Anvil Press Poetry

Founded in 1968, Anvil Press grew from New Measure, a student magazine edited by Peter Jay at Oxford. Supported by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Jay published six pamphlets and two books before moving the press to Greenwich in 1969, where it remained until 2015. Jay directed Anvil throughout, with help from a small staff.

Anvil issued six to ten titles annually, often by poets personally connected with Jay. It focused on modern and contemporary poetry in English, publishing Carol Ann Duffy’s first two collections (and two anthologies she edited), seven volumes by Dennis O’Driscoll, and work by F. T. Prince, Stanley Moss, Dick Davis, Ruth Silcock, Heather Buck, Peter Levi, E. A. Markham, Anthony Howell and Martina Evans.

Anvil also built up a distinguished list of translated poetry. It published leading poets from Europe, Latin America and China, including five collections by Chinese poet Bei Dao, Michael Hamburger’s award-winning translations of Paul Celan, and Ted Hughes’s versions of János Pilinszky. It also published pre-1900 and classical works in modern translations.

International in scope, the press’s range was reflected in Jay’s anthology The Spaces of Hope (1998). After cuts in funding by Arts Council England led to Anvil losing much of its subsidy, Peter Jay retired from publishing in 2015, and Anvil Press closed. Its publications list, however, was taken over by Carcanet Press, the Manchester-based poetry publisher.