Granting all points made re the OUP Contemporary Poets list it seems to
me that there's a much wider context here, i.e. the decline over a long
period of the Oxford literary list generally. Most marked in the decline
of the Clarendon English Texts series: a list which has seen definitive
or at least major editions of Beddoes, Blake, Chatterton, Coleridge,
Donne, Herbert, Marvell & Wordsworth (to name just a few) go apparently
irrevocably out of print, & in which production standards have fallen in
inverse proportion to cover price (a set of McGann's excellent Byron
would cost you well over 500 quid - although the annual sale catalogue
often shows spectacular price cuts - significantly?). This is not just
to give OUP a black mark; clearly they are now struggling in an area of
publishing they once dominated; the initiative has passed on to the
American University Presses. It's a context in which the axing of the
Contemporary Poets list might have looked inevitable sooner or later;
some of its productions have looked half-hearted in a publishing scene
which in some ways favours smaller & more focussed presses; where I
guess a good few of us here have seen the future of contemporary poetry
publishing to lie for quite a long time.
But ah I'd just never seen Ric as an ageing mistress in a French novel.
I really hadn't.
AH
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