Peter Jones obituary

Peter Jones’s enthusiasm for American poetry was reflected in the output of PN Review and Carcanet Press Photograph: family

Peter Jones was an unacknowledged presence in many poetry lovers’ libraries. He edited the Penguin collection Imagist Poetry, first published in 1972 and still in print, since 2001 as a Penguin Modern Classic. It also exists in Chinese translation.

Peter, who has died aged 96, also played key roles in the magazine PN Review and in Carcanet Press, the literary publishers we founded at Pin Farm, South Hinksey, Oxford, in 1969. Peter shared “the labour and the risks”, Mark Fisher wrote in Letters to an Editor (1989) – he surrendered his teacher’s pension to help finance the projects. Apart from Imagist Poetry, he wrote Fifty American Poets (1980); some of the 50 writers he chose challenged the English reader. We published them.