The poet Ronald Bottrall died in July at the age of 83. His was an enigmatic reputation: he could number among his admirers F.R. Leavis, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, involuntarily recalling Yeats's personal obituary, "say my glory was I had such friends". This is an unwonted distortion, but a distortion perpetuated by that same early critical acclaim against which, ironically, Leavis warned in New Bearings in English Poetry. Bottrall, like Yeats, survived his admirers and went on to produce a mature body of work in which images of a curiously dated topicality mingle with rugged lyricism and a stoical good humour. Often, though, the stoicism concealed an understandable bitterness which surfaced in a letter written from Rome (where he lived for many years) in 1973: "Poetry publishing is certainly in a ghastly mess and poetry itself is in danger. What an indictment of our civilization..."
KEITH SILVER

George Buchanan, the novelist, poet and essayist, died in July at the age of 85. Although he started writing poetry in the 1920s, an age of 'impersonality', it was not until the early 1970s, after a decade of accelerated poetic creativity, that his detached, exhaustively precise verse began to receive the attention it merited. He had experienced success before the war with his novel Rose Forbes, published by Faber and widely acclaimed; but after the war it was hard to regain critical momentum. Gabberbocchus published two volumes of his autobiography, starting with his childhood in Ulster, the more notable being the cool, evocative Green Seacoasts, a book which made an impact on Stevie Smith, who drew her poem 'Not Waving but Drowning' from an incident recounted there. In later collections of poems, Minute-Book of a City and Inside Traffic among them, Buchanan developed and urban pastoral of almost documentary fidelity; indeed he sometimes found it hard to maintain the pace of the verse if that meant sacrificing any nuance of feeling. This was an honourable fault; the strenuous attention that lay behind some of his work also insisted that, "Extra inspection of an object leads / to composition of verse. Detailed description / transfigures it, appearance shifts", and points to what is durable in his verse as in his prose.
KEITH SILVER

Edward Said will give the first Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture on 10 October at Jeffrey Hall, the Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1 (6.00pm). The event is organized by the Raymond Williams Memorial Trust, set up in Williams's memory earlier this year with a distinguished list of sponsors and seeking donations for its work (to be sent to Graham Martin, Faculty of Arts, Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA). The lectures will be annual events to "discuss and develop the continuing relevance of Williams's extraordinarily wide-ranging work to future cultural and political practice".

At last the complete works of the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado are being published in four substantial volumes by Espasa Calpe, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the poet's death in exile in Colliure, France. The distinguished editor Oreste Macri has assembled and annotated the very full text, and the project has had the benefit of substantial subsidies to bring it to fruition. Machado's achievement has been overshadowed, outside Spain, by the work of Lorca. When Machado finds an adequate English translator the valuation may change.

The Wheatland Prize has been awarded to the Hungarian translator Arpad Goncz. The prizewinner has translated some 150 works, among them major books by Faulkner, Lowry and Tolkien. Born in Budapest in 1922, he was imprisoned from 1957 to 1963 for high treason.

1992 is not only the Year of Europe: it is the Year of America as well - half a millennium since Columbus bumped into America. Writers interested in competitions should master Spanish post-haste to enter for the Primer Premio América de Narrativa, a prize contrived by the council of Extremadura to discover the Novel of 1992. It is the largest Spanish literary award for fiction, open to writers from the Iberian Peninsula and from America: fifteen million pesetas.

Berthold Wolpe, famous for his Gollancz and Faber book jackets, died in July. With his death the link between his German design background and the subsequent influence on this country is severed, Stephen Raw writes. By the time Wolpe arrived in London, escaping from the Nazis in 1933, he left behind an impressive body of graphic, metal and inscriptional work. These disciplines fused in what will perhaps be his most lasting monument: the typeface Albertus.

Wolpe's retrospective exhibition at the V & A in 1980 surprised even his closest colleagues by the range of work undertaken. I remember him showing me, in his retirement year at Fabers (1975) the inside typography of a Nicolette Gray book Nineteenth-Century Ornamental Typefaces and telling me about all the special details he had had to attend to. It was typical of the man that the hidden and subtle art of such a job should have given him so much satisfaction.

The pioneer Spanish feminist publishing house Ediciones La Sal are preparing the first Feminist Book Salon for next year in Spain's book capital, Barcelona. Following La Sal, several other Spanish publishing houses are establishing women's lists, including the venerable house of Baroja (San Sebastián) and Castalia. The re-issuing of women's work from medieval to modern times is a major editorial undertaking, and as it proceeds the map of Spanish literature will doubtless come to look rather different. A major seminar organized by María Mayoral on nineteenth-century Spanish women writers, especially those involved in the Romantic movement from 1840 to 1870, scrutinized the work of several writers, notably María Josefa Masanés, Amalia Fenollosa, Angela Grassi and María Dolores Cabrera y Heredía.

The French publishers Gallimard have published the correspondence between Marcel Proust and his editor Gaston Gallimard. There are more than 400 letters, most of them previously unpublished and covering the period from 1916 to 1922. Proust was very agitated about design, author's rights, publicity and the perennial bellyaches of writers. Proust must have been almost as hard on typesetters as Balzac was: his proofs would come back with the margins thick with corrections. He missed the actual textual misprints: basically he was redrafting. It was on Gide's advice that, after six years' anguish, Gaston rejected Swann's Way.

The not unexpected news that Waterstones, the booksellers, had joined forces with Sherratt & Hughes, W.H. Smith's up-market chain, was both good and bad - good in that it assured Waterstones' long-term future and development, bad in that it is always sad to see an ambitious, independent and visionary entrepreneurial venture assimilated by a hungry, if benign, leviathan. There will be some rationalisation: it is to be hoped that the achievement of Waterstones will define the pace and direction of the new operation. The newly-extended Waterstones in Dublin, for example, is the paradigm for a great bookshop worthy of a capital city: acres of books well-displayed, and not only the books that other trade booksellers carry.

Revista de Occidente (Fortuny 53, 28010 Madrid) has devoted its March issue to Fernando Pessoa, a year after the fiftieth anniversary of his death. This issue contains several fascinating essays and meditations by outstanding Portuguese and Spanish critics, placing Pessoa squarely in context of the Orpheu group to which he belonged, and recalling the presence of other major figures who have been marginalised by his huge achievement, notably Angelo de Lima and Mario Sa-Carneiro.

Anthony Neville, the bookseller, at 15 Market Street, Rye, East Sussex TN31 7LA, has published Conrad Aiken, Our Father, a book of memoirs of the American poet written by his three children, themselves authors. They concentrate on their childhood in England and evoke the textures, the voices and the places in which they knew their somewhat truant father. They also present some of the large-scale figures that moved through their lives: Paul Nash, Dame Laura Knight, T.S. Eliot and Malcolm Lowry among them. At £3.95 paperback, with a handsome detail of a picture by Aiken's friend Edward Burra, this is an attractive publication.

Thom Gunn's poetry will be the subject of the first of a new series on BBC Radio 3: 'Poet of the Month'. Clive Wilmer is the presenter and interviewer, as well as the selector of the poets.