Apologies if you get this twice or more - I tried to send it direct from The 
Guardian website but it doesn't seem to have registered.  Anyway - it's a 
lovely obit of Andrew by Peter Riley.

>
> To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/21/culture.obituaries
>
> Andrew Crozier
> Poet, publisher and rescuer of many forgotten works
> Peter Riley
> Monday July 21 2008
> The Guardian
>
>
> English poetry and literary studies have been thick with claims to 
> radicalism of many different hues in recent times. But there have been few 
> writers whose radicalism went to the roots of language's relationship to 
> experience as that of Andrew Crozier, producing in the process a poetry of 
> such remarkable freshness, vibrancy and emotional candour. He has died 
> aged 64 of a brain tumour.
>
> Crozier proposed that a poem should be constantly and freshly conceived as 
> a construct of language which achieves beauty through a fidelity to the 
> actual. The poem is offered to the world as an objective and selfless form 
> in which, to reverse his verdict on Philip Larkin, "you are asked to trust 
> the poem, not the poet".
>
> When his collected poems were published under the title All Where Each Is 
> (1985), they filled 300 pages in which these principles were rigorously 
> maintained, but in a variety of forms, from epigrammatic couplets to 
> collage-like inventions. Central to his work are meditations on landscape 
> and intimacy expressed in a bared honesty which is the result of 
> considerable discipline.
>
> Crozier was born in Little Gaddesden, Hertfordshire. Both his parents were 
> members of the Communist party; as a student at Christ's College 
> Cambridge, where he read English from 1961, having arrived from Dulwich 
> college, south London, with a scholarship, he was twice arrested for civil 
> disobedience during the Aldermaston marches. While still an undergraduate 
> he began to formulate a renewed path for poetry, in which the radicalism 
> of his temperament and politics was wrought into a rethinking of poetry's 
> task in the world.
>
> In 1964, a Fulbright scholarship took him to the State University of New 
> York at Buffalo, where he was taught by Charles Olson, and on returning to 
> Britain the following year he worked on a thesis at Essex University on 
> Free Verse as Formal Restraint (a title which sums up quite a lot about 
> his work). He began his professional career in 1967 at Keele University, 
> where the presence of the poet Roy Fisher was valued, and in 1973 moved to 
> Sussex University, from which he retired in 2005. His teaching was known 
> for its uncompromising but sympathetic and inspiring rigour.
>
> From the outset, Crozier worked to bring practitioners together. In 1966 
> he founded The English Intelligencer, a "worksheet" circulated among some 
> 30 poets to exchange knowledge of their current activities without 
> worrying too much about finished poems, and from 1964 onwards ran The 
> Ferry Press, which published first or early books of many important 
> British poets in carefully designed editions, frequently with covers 
> designed by then little-known artists, including Patrick Caulfield and 
> Michael Craig-Martin. He collaborated further, in special illustrated 
> editions of his own poetry, with artists such as Ian Tyson, Tom Phillips, 
> and his own brother, Philip Crozier.
>
> His criticism was important, but remains as yet scattered in periodicals 
> and anthologies, and some of his projects were never completed. The stress 
> was again on sweeping the board clean and examining the history afresh: 
> what took place, what was produced and what its value might be, and this 
> naturally resulted in reversals of received positions, and the rescuing of 
> forgotten poets, which became almost a speciality of his.
>
> The most dramatic rescue operation was that of the American poet Carl 
> Rakosi, who had been silent for 25 years before Crozier tracked him down, 
> but who began writing again as a result of Crozier's attention.
>
> His scholarship resulted in two editions: of Rakosi's early poetry in 
> 1995, and a venture back to the 1920s in an edition of the modernist poet 
> John Rodker in 1996.
>
> His principal campaign in British poetry was to redeem the 1940s from what 
> he saw as a lot of wilful distortion and suppression affected by 
> opportunist 1950s poet-critics. He also published essays examining the 
> poetical process in the works of Fisher, George Oppen, Basil Bunting and 
> others.
>
> Crozier was calm, thoughtful and meticulous in everything he did as a 
> poet, in his professional career, in his speech and manner, and finally in 
> his esconcement with his wife Jean in a converted farmhouse deep in a wood 
> in East Sussex surrounded by his remarkable book collection, augmented by 
> all the other things they collected around them with such care: paintings, 
> prints, objets trouvés, ceramics, the horses in the paddock and the 
> ducks in the pond.
>
> And air is full of a transparency/ Before there start to drift the 
> shadows/ Edging across its empty surfaces / To mark a passage of unspoken 
> hope.
>
> Jean, whom he married in 1970, survives him.
>
 Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier, poet, born July 26 1943; died April 3 2008

Peter Riley