The concluding sentence in Professor David Herd's paper 'Declining National Culture: The Dislocated Poetics of A Various Art', given at the University of Orono in June 2012, suggested that the two editors of the 1987 Carcanet volume, Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, curated in their anthology 'a poetic space in which a productive linguistic distancing could be achieved, in which markers of affiliation need not be inscribed as read'. Herd pointed to Crozier's introduction as a marker of how this anthology rebuts any claim to being a collection of 'national poetry' and wondered how, 'in the absence of geo-political affiliation', a body of poetry addresses itself to the reader. The correspondence from the mid- to late 1960s between Tim Longville and Michael Grant goes some way to answering this question when one realises how much of the poetry written by these two Cambridge men was a matter of collaboration and mutual criticism as well as a register of the extent to which an awareness of European poetry influenced their own work.

When Longville started a new publishing venture in Lincoln in 1966, along with his fellow poet from Cambridge, John Riley, and the printer Gordon Jackson, it was called Grosseteste Press. While Jackson was very much the 'hands-on' practical side of the new business Riley was central to all of the editorial decisions concerning the press. One of the earliestvolumes was a book of translations from Hölderlin, In the Arms of the Gods. Riley was working as a teacher ...