Or maybe the opposite was true: it was all the bricks taken away from Mother that killed her: there was nothing left to stand on.

Julia reached for my hand.

Julia keeps the books she has published over her career on particular shelves, chronologically ordered. Poetry begins in 1980, the year she started Bacchae Press, and ends in 2011, when she let it go. She was winding it up, actually, for most of its life, but it puttered along, borne up by small publishing grants and then courtesy of the Parish Estate. Her poets were a diverse bunch. Fragile men who looked exactly like poets. Defiantly robust men who didn’t look like poets at all. Well-kept middle-aged women with frumpy dress sense and furious, pretension-puncturing wit. Long-haired, side-parted youthful beauties who mingled their souls and their sex lives with adroit intertextual references and crisp parsing. Apart from Mother, Julia has not made much money publishing poetry. Nor have her poets. I don’t think anyone makes money out of poetry.

When Mother’s book came out, its success emboldened Julia. She was thrilled by her own role as discoverer of posthumous genius—‘I feel like the publisher who found Emily Dickinson! Or John Kennedy O’Toole!’ The story of tragedy implicit in posthumous publication appeals to the public’s hunger for biography, for sensation. Dickinson, upstairs in her locked room, meting out her en-dashes. John Kennedy O’Toole and his rejection slips. It’s only recently I’ve learned the history of Moby Dick—after its publication, Herman Melville returned to his job as shipping clerk, and if it hadn’t been for the furious championing of early twentieth-century male writers, we might not know the novel today. Success is, not wholly perhaps but partially, a matter of luck and good timing. Tragedy is a fabulous marketing bonus.

‘It’s true that we don’t read a book anymore,’ Julia says, ‘without wanting to know the story of its author.’ She sighs. ‘One can’t sell a book anymore, without manufacturing such a story. The booksellers need these hooks to hang their books on.’

Poetry has not been a staunch investment prospect. The market for poetry has shrunk and shrunk.

Julia mourns this too. ‘People don’t understand it,’ she says. ‘I don’t really understand why they need to understand it. A poem is not a code that needs to be deciphered.’

Once, Julia started writing a book of her own but found she had no talent for it. ‘I am a rearranger and fixer,’ she said. ‘I can see the beautiful skeleton and I carve away the excess flesh. I have an eye that goes for the throat of a thing.’