Geoffrey Godbert obituary

Geoffrey Godbert, who has died aged 80, published more than a dozen collections of his own poetry; was joint editor of the Greville Press with Harold Pinter and Anthony Astbury; and produced two very successful anthologies, 100 Poems by a Hundred Poets (1986) and 99 Poems in Translation (1994).

Asked in an interview what was the worst rejection he had suffered from a publisher, he said it was that by Oxford University Press in the late 1950s, namely: “Some of your poems are not poems at all.” Asked if he had had any regrets about pursuing a “career” as a poet, he replied that he had none but, like Coleridge, advised that one should also “take a day job”.