EDITORIAL
After three special issues featuring Indonesian literature, Singaporean women’s writing, and eco-poetics, we return to our standard magazine offering of poems, translations, short stories, and reviews which have been submitted to us from around the world. But we do so with a heavy heart following the loss of our co-editor and friend Elaine Glover who died from an aggressive cancer in September.
Elaine was at the centre of our editorial team for the last fifteen years or more and it is our privilege to be able to pay tribute to her in the first section of this issue. She was a truly committed individual. With her energy, genial encouragement, and steely determination, she made poetry happen. Amongst the coffee, cake, and conversation she gave us the joy of her mischievous good humour. The Stand office in Leeds is small. Elaine filled it many times over with her sharp intelligence and her love.
There are tributes here from long-standing friends Margaret Beatham, Rodney Pybus, Lorna Tracy, Michael Schmidt, and Jeffrey Wainwright and from a younger generation of friends – writers and editors whom she has inspired over the last two decades: Rachel Bower, Hannah Copley, Kathryn Jenner, Helen Mort, Emily Jane Timms, and Emma Trott. Many others might have been added to that list. Our cover design features a work by Elaine’s sister, the US artist Nancy Shaver. Given Elaine’s determined modesty and inveterate self-abnegation it is a particular pleasure that we have been able to recover and are able to showcase four of her poems from the mid-1960s when she first became involved with Stand as a Junior Year Abroad student at the University of Leeds.
Elaine’s legacy is not simply one of warm friendship and inspirational example so movingly expressed in the following eulogies. She has motivated a new generation of editors and supporters of the magazine. With the benefit of that legacy we look confidently to the future as we make the necessary adjustments to the editorial team.
This issue pays tribute to Elaine simply by continuing the business of the magazine. We are delighted to feature a ‘canto’ of Sean O’Brien’s latest long poem Hammersmith which will be published in April 2020 as well as the work of poets who were prominent in the Bi’an project (for writers of Chinese heritage) led by Mary Cooper: Jay G. Ying, Natalie Linh Balderston, L Kiew, Jennifer Wong, and Kia Yee Ang and Jennifer Lee Tsai.
Elaine’s scribbled short-hand term on the box-file for the present issue as she looked forward to it after three ‘specials’ was ‘Stand mash-up’ – a glimpse of her humour in the midst of magazine practicalities. I hope you will enjoy it on its own merits and as a fitting tribute to Elaine.
John Whale
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