To mark National Poetry Day 2021 we caught up with Jane Feaver, Editorial Manager of Poetry at Faber…

Can you tell us what you’ve been up to recently?

I’ve just started back in a job I last did twenty years ago in the poetry department of Faber and Faber. It’s an exciting time to be back, reconnecting with familiar faces and making connections with new. The current publishing schedule represents this mix of old and new, with a second collection just out by Jack Underwood and the retrospectively published debuts of Ishion Hutchinson and Ilya Kaminsky.

Can you share some of the poetry you’re most excited about?

This week sees publication of a beautiful, illustrated version of the Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale by Simon Armitage, and, in November, a new collection, Howdie-Skelp by Paul Muldoon. I’ve had sight of two wondrous manuscripts due out in spring next year, Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut, Quiet, and a much-anticipated volume from Emily Berry, Unexhausted Time.

What are you focusing on right now?

At this moment, I’m reading Maurice Riordan’s Shoulder Tap, published at the end of this month. I love it: a poet writing at the top of his form, poems that stretch out across a life, from childhood to middle age: it’s funny, wry and moving. This touching elegy to Seamus Heaney is a case in point and is shared here for National Poetry Day:

          Feet

          in memory

We were sitting in the restaurant window
when I heard myself say Seamus is here –
though there was no greeting. And our view was blocked
by the brewery lorry mounted on the kerb.
I’d no sight of him. But it was nothing spooky either.
What I had seen under the lorry were two feet
passing on the other side. I’d known him by the gait,
as one would by the voice. Yet I’d never before
noticed his feet – and, if asked, I might have guessed
he had a fisherman’s walk, slow and deliberate.
But no, what I saw were the feet of a schoolboy
invisibly sandaled, stepping nimbly towards us.

from Maurice Riordan’s Shoulder Tap

By permission of Faber & Faber Ltd