I always read Contributors’ Notes in magazines, which may be why I noticed that a writer had appeared twice in the Contributors’ Notes on the last page of PNR 268. The entries were differently worded, the first longer and more detailed than the second.

This made me recall how recent this section of PN Review is, and how the magazine has frowned on such things over so many decades. There were Contributors’ Notes in the early Poetry Nation years – ‘GEOFFREY HILL’S first collection, For the Unfallen (1959), has been reissued by André Deutsch, who publish King Log (1968) and Mercian Hymns (1971)’ – but biographical notes of any kind were entirely gone by the time the first PN Review appeared in 1977.

Back they came just a few years ago, but often as a random selection. PNR 268 gives us seventeen names from about twice the number of writers listed on the Contents page. Neither Contributors’ Notes nor its occasional variant, Some Contributors, make it across to the online version of PN Review, presumably because they are already missing from the Contents page of the printed magazine. Certainly they always feel like an afterthought, included if space permits.

I find this odd because regular features like ‘News & Notes’ at the front of the magazine build a strong sense of company and commonality, especially in the brief acknowledgements of deceased poets. Those pocket obits ought to be depressing but they always leave me oddly encouraged. Other people have devoted their lives to this unlikely ...