I recently visited Cary Archard at his home in the Vale of Glamorgan. The cottage is centuries old and has massive walls. In the huge fireplace, now occupied by a diminutive but efficient stove, bread for the village was once baked. It was a particularly fine late autumn day and the view from the windows over broad fields rolling gently down to the hidden sea was deliciously rural. This landscape was not Archard property, I was assured, carved out of the Vale on the profits of publishing, but what might be termed the Agatha Christie domain, acquired by her surviving relative, the beneficiary of her literary estate.

Although we have met from time to time over the years, at book launches and literary events, I had not spoken at any length to Cary since inviting him to become reviews editor of Poetry Wales following an initial encounter at an Academi conference in Harlech, as he told Robert Minhinnick in the interview published in Poetry Wales in 2004 (Vol. 40, No. 2). That was probably in the spring of 1974, for I see his name heading the reviews section for the first time in the summer number of that year (10, 1), a special devoted to Sir T.H. Parry-Williams. Sticklers for facts will wish to note that he persuaded John Holloway, Professor of Modern English at Cambridge, to consider Ten Anglo-Welsh Poets in the second number for ...