Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books interviewed by James Byrne

James Byrne interviews Neil Astley, the founder and editor of Bloodaxe Books, on the press's twenty-fifth anniversary; the issue is dated December 2003. A headnote lists Astley's own work: two poetry collections, Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue, a novel, The End of My Tether, and anthologies including Poetry With An Edge and Staying Alive.

Astley begins with the press's origins in 1978, when he saw himself as a representative reader, drawn to poets who could not get published or whose books had gone out of print. The talk soon becomes an argument about how contemporary poetry reaches the public. He cites an Arts Council report, Rhyme & Reason, which found that modern poetry has an image problem, and its finding that only five per cent of poetry books sold in a two-year period were by living poets. His target, he says, is not readers but poetry snobs and a small circle of poets, editors and critics who decide what counts as valuable. He quotes a Poetry Book Society report to the same effect and points out that over three-quarters of collections are by men although most readers are women.

On Staying Alive, which drew criticism while becoming Britain's top-selling poetry book, he describes a book chosen poem by poem to persuade general readers, with word of mouth driving sales. He says the anthology is "a book of poems, not of poets". The remaining questions cover how Bloodaxe's backlist of more than 700 books by over 300 poets cannot be represented in one anthology, his favourite poets, and why he turned to fiction after Biting My Tongue, treating the novel as poetry written in another form, shaped by the seasons and by Kieslowski's films. He praises translated poetry, notes the number of first collections issued by Bloodaxe since 1994, and ends on the bookshops' shrinking poetry shelves and the need for more readers.

Work

Staying Alive

Author

edited by Neil Astley

Publisher

Bloodaxe Books

It's a book of poems, not of poets.

Neil Astley, The Wolf, issue 5

People think it's irrelevant and incomprehensible

Neil Astley, The Wolf, issue 5