About the Greville Press

For Pinter, acting was always a form of release. So too was poetry: not only writing it, but also active promotion of the form itself. In 1975 Pinter had accepted an invitation from Anthony Astbury a poetry-loving teacher at a private school in Warwick, to give a reading of his own work at the Warwick Gallery. The evening was not only a big success. The two men discovered they shared similar tastes in poetry, and when Astbury and another friend, Geoffrey Godbert, decided to set up a small publishing imprint called the Greville Press, Pinter gave it his enthusiastic support. Indeed, the Press was launched with an event at the Purcell Room in September 1979 when George Barker, William Empson, David Gascoyne, W S. Graham, John Heath-Stubbs and John Wain all read from their work. Pinter chaired and compered the evening; and over the years he has devoted a good deal of time, energy and money to the Greville Press. He co-edited two anthologies -100 Poems by 100 Poets and 99 Poems in Translation - formally joined the board in 1987 and privately financed some twenty volumes of poetry, as well as paying for sundry launch parties. Pinter's the last person to seek publicity for his efforts, but it's a good example of how he frequently does good by stealth.

Peter Guttridge meets the founders and editors of the Greville Press

"The Greville Press is a ray of hope at time when poetry is in dudgeon," says Edna O'Brien. She has been published three times by the small, Warwick-based poetry press, which recently enjoyed a ceremonial moment when it produced its 50th title, 10 Early Poems by Harold Pinter.
That the Greville Press should simultaneously publish a first collection by Kate Ellis, a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Derby, and the first translations of the poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, father of the filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky, is typical of the small firm's exhilarating eclecticism....
Over the years the Greville Press has published the poetry of George Barker, David Gascoyne, W S Graham, Edna O'Brien, C H Sisson and David Wright.

Imagine being let loose on the entire corpus of English verse and being asked to chose exactly 100 poems by 100 different poets for an anthology. Given that immense brief it would not be surprising if a book never appeared at all, but somehow Harold Pinter, Geoffrey Godbert and Anthony Astbury managed to filter out from their fierce discussions one of the most interesting and tantalizing of poetry collections.
100 Poems but 100 Poets published yesterday, bears witness first and foremost to an immense love and knowledge of poetry in all its shapes and forms. Sandwiched between such beloved chestnuts as Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Keats' Ode to a Nightingale are a myriad of lesser known gems including a very naughty bit of Burns, a splenetic piece by a certain Barnabe Googe, and John Crowe Ransom's witty sonnet Piazza Piece.
More that anything, the book illuminates the concerns of poets and poetry. There is much of love, both fulfilled and unrequited, something of ageing and death, of anger and wit.
It succeeds, as the best anthologies should, in making you wonder why you don't read more poetry, and giving you some faint indication of the answer to that impossible question, what is poetry?
This selection definitely is the real McCoy, even if, inevitably your favourite are left out. Half the fun of reading it is carrying on you own mental arguments with the compilers.
The book originated in a train journey from London to Penzance, when Harold Pinter, Geoffrey Godbert and Emscote Lawn School English teacher Anthony Astbury were travelling to visit Nessie Graham, the widow of W.S. Graham.
The 12 hours of fierce arguing on the journey there and back beat the book more less into shape. The only rules in making the selection was that the poem should be written in English, be reprinted in full and exclude living poets so that the choice could be made from the entire body of the poet's work.
It is slightly heartening to see women marginally better represented in this selection than in most - 12 per cent - and the poems are arranged in alphabetical order which mans each one stands only in its own context.
Best of all, the book reveals the dynamism and relevance of the medium itself through its range and variety and as such renders all poets and poetry distinguished service.

Leamington Courier