Anvil Press Poetry

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Its staff consists of

Peter Jay: Founder, editorial and production director

Kit Yee Wong: Administration, rights

We publish 10–12 new books a year: contemporary poetry in English and translated poetry from all periods, sometimes in bilingual editions. What we are looking for can best be illustrated by an anthology published in 1998 to celebrate 30 years of Anvil’s publishing: The Spaces of Hope. It shows the range of poets and kinds of poetry which Anvil values with poems drawn from the press’s publications and includes an essay by Peter Jay discussing the enterprise and its values.

The following poem by the late Ivan V. Lalić, translated by Francis R. Jones, lends its title to the anthology.

The Spaces of Hope

I have experienced the spaces of hope,
The spaces of a moderate mercy. Experienced
The places which suddenly set
Into a random form: a lilac garden,
A street in Florence, a morning room,
A sea smeared with silver before the storm,
Or a starless night lit only
By a book on the table. The spaces of hope
Are in time, not linked into
A system of miracles, nor into a unity;
They merely exist. As in Kanfanar,
At the station; wind in a wild vine
A quarter-century ago: one space of hope.
Another, set somewhere in the future,
Is already destroying the void around it,
Unclear but real. Probable.

In the spaces of hope light grows,
Free of charge, and voices are clearer,
Death has a beautiful shadow, the lilac blooms later,
But for that it looks like its first-ever flower.

Ivan V. Lalić
Translated by Francis R. Jones

Anvil Press Poetry acknowledges financial support from Arts Council England

Anvil Press is committed to promoting equality of opportunity and inclusion, irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, race, disability or age.