Dates

• Existence: 1943 - 2008

Biography

Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier, poet, publisher and academic, was born in Little Gaddesden, Hertfordshire, on 26 July 1943 and educated at Dulwich College and Christ's College Cambridge, where he read English (B.A. 1964, M.A. 1968) and edited an American supplement to 'Granta'. In 1964 he founded the Ferry Press, and in succeeding years produced editions of poetry by J. H. Prynne, John James, Douglas Oliver, Peter Riley and others. In 1964-5 he studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo on a Fulbright scholarship, being taught there by the poet Charles Olson. On his return to the United Kingdom he began a thesis, 'Free Verse as Formal Restraint', at the Department of Comparative Literature at Essex University, and founded the 'Wivenhoe Park Review'. From 1966 he was co-editor of 'The English Intelligencer', described as a 'worksheet' circulated among a small group of poets sharing a common outlook. In 1967 he was appointed to a teaching post at Keele University, moving to the University of Sussex in 1973. As a critic, academic and publisher he helped to revive the reputations of a number of writers, most notably the American poets Carl Rakosi and John Rodker; in 1987 he edited with Tim Longville the anthology 'A Various Art'. His own verse publications included 'Loved Litter of Time Spent', 'Walking on Grass', 'The Veil Poem', 'Pleats' (joint winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize in 1976), 'Residing', 'High Zero', 'Were There' and (with Ian Tyson) 'Utamaro Variations'; a collected poems, 'All Where Each Is', appeared in 1985. Crozier retired from Sussex as Professor of Prose in 2005, and died on 3 April 2008. 'An Andrew Crozier Reader', edited with an introduction by Ian Brinton, was published in 2012.

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