Sir. - Is Keith Thomas, in his attempt to justify the closure of the Oxford University Press's poetry list deliberately clouding the issue or genuinely ill-informed? Either way, it's worrying that the chairman of the Finance Committee should claim that, because OUP does "not publish fiction or drama", it is "ill-placed to market and sell poetry". Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard, two of the playwrights who must have earned the Press considerable royalties, will be surprised by this news. The argument is anyway irrelevant. Poetry has no need to be marketed alongside novels and plays, as it occupies a different space in bookshops.
Thomas finds it "most surprising... none of the many Oxford academics who write poetry publish it" with OUP. Even if this were true, which it's not, what is Thomas's point? That none of them would be seen dead with such a sorry crew? Being dead now looks like their only chance. Not content with axeing the list, Thomas now wishes to insult it too. The 'canonical' poets whom Thomas proudly claims that OUP will continue to publish are the same poets who, only two months ago, OUP was trying to sell off, alongside the living, as a complete job lot. For Thomas, "the meagreness of the rights income is a telling index of the relative lack of interest which the list has attracted. The sad truth is that much of the list's renown is posthumous, a product of the recent agitation." In attempting to sell the whole list, OUP cynically offered this public outcry as proof of the list's vitality. Thomas ought to decide which of these sad truths he would prefer to settle for, and stick to it. A more "telling index" for the lack of interest might be the number of offers many OUP poets received from other publishers within days of the closure.
If you're so smart, he seems to be saying, how come you're not rich? His reference to "the part-time and freeelance" editor - the unnamed Jacqueline Simms - has the same hauteur. For no appsarent reason, Keith Thomas believes himself informed enough to cast doubt on her expertise for "talent-spotting within the present generation".
]AMIE McKENDRlCK, Hertford College, Oxford