Interviews

Enthusiasm, eloquence, a distinctive voice, openness to the unexpected, a well-stocked mind, wit, and humour: some or all of these gifts would make the ideal reviewer ...

You learn very different things from different poets, from formal aspects, some of them minute, to whole revelations about what a poem might be. This is always developing, and influences tend to come in waves or moments, with anthologies and magazines, subcultures ...

I work for an outfit called Narrative Verse in English, our company founder being a man called Geoff, Geoff Chaucer. After him it’s up for grabs, though given what I write, Pope, Byron, Browning. Clough, Meredith, Frost, and Kenneth Koch rate very highly ...

I’m in a Austen, Brontë, Eliot phase. Probably Elizabeth Gaskell, though, because of North and South (1855): so topical given the way the digital revolution has impoverished so many and enriched so few.

ABR: Which poets have most influenced you? PB: Influence is transient – it changes all the time. I can’t always pinpoint it directly or say which poets might be most influential on my poems. From the mid-1960s I read everything – the French, the Dadaists, the Eastern Europeans, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Gertrude Stein reigned supreme for me ...

I write to make sense of the world – or at least to ask better questions – and because words are powerful, transformative tools that can help bring into being a more just and life-giving world ...

I am in publishing to make a positive difference to society, so when one feels that, with the author, we’re doing that, it’s gratifying. The greatest challenge is trying to explain why not all good books find the readership they deserve, despite marketing efforts and positive media and reviews. For some books, the time is not right.

My first job in publishing was a paid editorial internship with legal house CCH in the early 1990s. It taught me a lot: not least the importance of being meticulous (and earnest). However, the glitz and glamour of trade publishing caught my eye and I soon jumped ship, spending twelve or so years at HarperCollins, Hardie Grant, and Pan Macmillan before co-founding Brio in 2011.

I figure that with practice I might improve. Even if I don’t, I will persist. If in an entire book there is one sentence that works, I see it as proof of growth. Sometimes that sentence stares back at me as if it came from somewhere else ...