Richard Caddel was a poet and champion of poetry as publisher, editor,

anthologist and organiser. That he was not better known is perhaps due to a

predilection for Ôedges', those areas marginalised by geography, commerce or

choice, which his friend and fellow-poet Jaan Kaplinski called the

"wandering borders".

Caddel was born in 1949 and grew up in Gillingham on the Medway, and went to

read Music at Newcastle University, soon adding English and History. Basil

Bunting was then the university's Poetry Fellow, and to one who had, as he

later said, "started reading and writing poems for the excitement of the

physical impact of words joined together", Bunting's example, and work, was

a revelation. Caddel began to realise a poetry rich enough to mirror the

actual world, compositionally complex enough not to need an external music.

In 1971, the year he graduated, Caddel married Ann Barker, and after

training as a librarian took up a job at Durham University Library (joining,

with Borges and Mao Tse-Tung, a select band of poet-librarians...). This was

the time of the 'British Poetry Revival'; the North-East was active in its

own right, and Caddel was fundamental. He assisted Connie Pickard in

running the legendary Morden Tower reading series; he and Ann started their

poetry imprint, Pig Press.

After some years commuting from Newcastle (his early poetry runs to the

rhythm of local trains) the Caddels, with two young children, Tom and Lucy,

moved permanently to Durham, where he set up the Colpitts reading series.

Pig Press went on to produce many important and beautifully-designed books

from poets well and less well-known: Tony Baker, Robert Creeley, Roy Fisher,

Lee Harwood, Barry MacSweeney, Carl Rakosi, Colin Simms Ð and dozens of

others (including, posthumously, Lorine Niedecker).

Caddel quietly displayed a sense of reciprocity towards the poetry

community; you are published, so you publish; you read, so you arrange

readings. Always sociably and convivially. Friends and family activities

and words find a home in his writing: "the work's all done kids //

grown up through / all their teethÉ". A poetry that in lesser hands might

have been merely private or occasional was made able, through the generosity

of attention to human detail, to speak in a wider social space. The reader

is included. This work is gathered in "Sweet Cicely" (1983), appropriately

dedicated to Ann, Tom and Lucy. His next major collection, "Uncertain Time"

(1990), reflects the politics of the 80s, setting "the realm of / false,

muddled argument" against "that contact / with the world in which / (for

which) / I liveÉ", against the small delights of "voice, steps / little

gusts, plants, things // we love in balance".

In the late 80s Caddel took over the library's European Documentation

Centre. This provided an opportunity for foreign travel - and meeting local

poets, fruitful contacts which led to readings and publications. When Durham

University acquired Bunting's papers, Caddel was instrumental in

establishing the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre, which promoted academic

research and living poetry, hosting readings and lectures by the likes of

Robert Creeley and Eric Mottram. With commercial interest in Bunting's work

waning, Caddel's compilation of the "Uncollected Poems" (OUP, 1991) was an

important piece of rescue archaeology which enabled his editing of the

"Complete Poems" (OUP, 1994).

An enduring outcome of Caddel's commitment to contemporary writing is the

acclaimed "OTHER: British and Irish Poetry since 1970", co-edited with Peter

Quartermain for Wesleyan University Press (1999). A larger readership on

both sides of the Atlantic could now encounter a poetry other than that of

commercial, "high-street" presses. A broader poetic community was also

facilitated, one might say brought into being, by Caddel's founding in 1996

the first e-mail poetry listserv in the UK, "British and Irish Poets, which

he co-ordinated for five years.

In 1995 the Caddels' lives were radically altered by the accidental death of

their son Tom; away at university, he slipped and fell through an

inadequately shielded stairwell. Much of Richard Caddel's remaining writing

was to be coloured by this loss, the near-impossibility of containing or

representing it. "For the Fallen" (1997) is a hundred poems derived from

the old Welsh "Gododdin", itself a series of elegies for dead sons; Tom

becomes one among others, set into "highstrung history". The closing words

of "Larksong Signal" (1997), a book curtailed, are "So I / stumble to rest

missing you, not twenty"; yet it opens celebrating his daughter Lucy's

vitality: "you laugh, / are ardent / in what you do. // I love you / for

that, too."

Tom's death was not to be the last blow to the Caddel family, for in 1999

Richard was diagnosed with leukaemia. He took early retirement from the

library, and he and Ann closed down Pig Press. This was not, however, a

retreat but a clearing of the decks; in the next couple of years Caddel was

to travel widely, not least to give readings. Translations started to appear

- into Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Lithuanian and Polish - and at home "Magpie

Words", a substantial ÔSelected', was published by West House Books in 2002.

Its alphabetical arrangement shows the corpus as if it were a single poem,

working through transitions and disjunctures, jumps and flows. ÔCounter'

almost celebrated the white blood cells of his leukaemia: "too much /

clogging the bee / dance step / stem cell leapÉ"; it concludes in a "signal

/ towards an unknown". "Magpie Words" closes with ÔWriting in the Dark', a

consciously unfinished sequence that the poet said he would continue at

"until the end". The title, so sombre-sounding, in fact refers literally to

his writing on a backlit personal organiser while sitting outdoors in the

dark. Ann appears therein, as throughout: "Your voice in this room / has

been with me // all I want to remember of / waking." The book doesn't end

thus, but in a way Richard Caddel's life did: "Snuff this / dark varnish

liquid, life. We / love it. Let it go."

Richard Ivo Caddel, poet, publisher and editor: born Bedford 13 July 1949;

staff, Durham University Library 1972-2000; Director, Basil Bunting Poetry

Centre, 1988-2003; married Ann Barker, 1971 (one son, Tom (1976-95); one

daughter, Lucy, b. 1978. Died Durham 1 April 2003.

Harry Gilonis

"The Independent", 11 April 2003