Peter Jay: The Last Bright Apple

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The Blessings and the Curse of the Bright Apple

What happens to books described as MINOR CLASSICS? I once asked a small-press publisher. They go out of print, he told me.

I thought of that remark this morning when I was looking again at a new book of poetry called The Last Bright Apple by the poet and publisher Peter Jay, a man best known for much of his working life as the founder and publisher of Anvil Press.

Anvil not only published a remarkable roster of poets, but also did so with some style. Peter Jay cared about how the books looked and felt in the hand.The paper on which the books were printed did not discolour after eighteen months.

I was first asked to review a book published by Anvil in 1984, when I was reviewing books of poetry for a monthly magazine called Books & Bookmen. The book was called Les Chimeres and its author was a 19th-century French art critic and poet called Gerard de Nerval. And its translator? Peter Jay, who was also its publisher.

Several things struck me about this book: that it had been published at all; that it was in hardback, which gave it a sense of authority that it deserved; and that it was such a beautiful object, so lovingly crafted.

I also thought this: only a dedicated madman would publish such a book as this in these inclement times. How many people will buy a book of poetry in translation?

But this gets us down to the nub of it. Publishers of poetry, those who establish and run small presses, generally are madmen. And mad women too. They have nothing to gain except to be known by a grateful few as publishers of poets who would often otherwise remain almost entirely unknown. Peter was one of those.

What is less known is the fact that Peter Jay was a fine poet in his own right, and this new book shows off his talents as a poet as never before, and a part of that talent was an ability to take off from, or perhaps to riff on, poets of the past, and they were usually much more temporally remote poets than  Gerard de Nerval.

The book is slender. You can read it at a single evening sitting, as I did. It is a book of tender reserve, of wistfulness, of the reaching out for symphonic moments which, grasped after, often seem to recede into a mist of incomprehension or unknowing. It is also, needless to say, a book deeply informed by the history of poetry and its past.

Peter rather regrets the fact that there is not more of it, that he did not squeeze more of the poet out of himself.

That, of course, is one of the curses of being a small-press publisher, that a strange, selfless dedication to publishing the poetry of others comes first.

The Last Bright Apple is published by Grey Suit Editions at £15 – Review by Michael Glover.

And there is now another review by Matthew Paul – scroll down to the end of the post to find it!