Val Warner, who has died aged 74, was a gifted poet, an editor, scholar, translator, teacher and occasional short-story writer. She was largely responsible for the rediscovery of the early-20th-century poet Charlotte Mew, whose collected poetry and prose she edited for Carcanet/Virago in 1981.
This was not her only exercise in rehabilitation. Her book The Centenary Corbière, with her own translations from French of Tristan Corbière’s poems and prose writings, was published to great acclaim in 1975, and drew attention to a poet whose reputation had waned somewhat in comparison with that of Jules Laforgue, say, or Charles Baudelaire.
Warner was born in Harrow, north-west London, to two schoolteachers, with whom she professed to have little in common. She was their only child. Following a grammar school education, Warner went on to study modern history at Somerville College, Oxford. It was probably the most purely enjoyable and invigorating period in a life not especially abundant in joie de vivre or personal happiness.
At Oxford she found her level as part of a stimulating group of aspiring poets and writers, all of whom would make their mark in their chosen fields. They included the poets Grevel Lindop and Gareth Reeves, the poet and scholar Sally Purcell, and the poet and editor Michael Schmidt, who went on to found Carcanet Press. By the time she graduated from Oxford, Warner had determined to devote her life to literature.
But the necessity to earn a living had to be considered first. Working as a school librarian, and freelance copy-editing, kept the wolf from the door – just. However, at the same time she produced a poetry pamphlet, These Yellow Photos, which secured her a Gregory award in 1971; and a full collection, Under the Penthouse, appeared from Carcanet in 1973.
Not a lyric poet, she had an individual style – highly individual, though it owed something to the influence of John Berryman; her poems are densely populated with contemporary London figures and features. They are often abrupt, sardonic, allusive and disabused.
Two further collections, Before Lunch (1986) and Tooting Idyll (1998), followed at lengthy intervals, and were well received. Alan Brownjohn, writing in the New Statesman, praised Warner’s “sharp, unnervingly observant comments on the contemporary scene [which were] full of wit, alertness and surprise”. She was much in demand for poetry readings, and contributed individual poems to a range of periodicals, from Ambit to Encounter.
From time to time, her work attracted the attention of poets of an older generation, who became mentors, in a sense, and also friends. They included George Buchanan and CH Sisson. She got to know Michael Hamburger, and would often visit him and his wife at their Suffolk home.
Between 1977 and 1988, Warner held the posts of creative writing fellow at the University College of Swansea, and writer in residence at Dundee University. Once she had returned to London, she became an active member of PEN International, working assiduously on behalf of writers in prison. She enjoyed a close friendship with the novelist Francis King (to whom her last book is dedicated), which lasted until his death in 2011. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1998.
During the last years of her life, Warner became increasingly eccentric and reclusive. She moved into a terraced house in Hackney where she lived without heating, hot water, adequate furnishings or cooking facilities. She gave up poetry and devoted herself to writing, simultaneously, 10 or so novels, none of which was ever completed. They went through many draft versions and revisions and generated a vast array of notes, which were printed out and dispersed in piles all over the house. She was utterly indifferent to ordinary home comforts or her own well-being.
Warner had no relatives, or anyone in the neighbourhood to keep an eye on her. She died alone, probably from malnutrition combined with various untreated ailments. Her death was discovered only when a friend, getting no response to repeated phone calls and emails, alerted the police. It was a tragic end to a life of high principle, endeavour and achievement.
We might think of the last lines of Mew’s poem A Quiet House: “The lamps just lighted down the long, dim street, / No one for me - / I think it is myself I go to meet: / I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be!”
• Valerie Margaret Warner, poet, born 15 January 1946; found dead 10 October 2020
