My friend Jacky Flurscheim, who has died aged 81, was the poetry editor at Oxford University Press from 1976 until 1998, when, to her grief and fury, the list was unceremoniously closed. For many years she also ran the Thomas Tallis Society in Greenwich, south-east London.
Born in Altrincham, outside Manchester, Jacky was the elder daughter of Honor (nee Platt) and Charles Flurscheim, an electro-mechanical engineer with AEI (Associated Electrical Industries). She went as a boarder to St Felix school in Suffolk, a county for which she retained a lasting affection, later spending idyllic times in a cottage on the marshes near Blythburgh. At school she flourished, playing the piano and directing plays.
After a year at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, followed by a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, she got her first taste of publishing with a job as an editorial assistant at Thames and Hudson, which fostered both attention to detail and her love of words, as she checked each individually pasted-up page.
In 1964 she married Philip Simms, a professional musician and organist at St Alfege Church, Greenwich. Together they launched the Thomas Tallis Society, named after another (rather more famous) organist of that parish. For years Jacky organised concerts, fixed overseas tours, and threw post-concert parties. Somehow she also found time to become a mother, to complete an English literature degree at what is now Goldsmiths, University of London, and to write and publish a novel, Unsolicited Gift (1982).
In 1976 she inherited responsibility for Oxford University Press’s poetry list from the academic and poet Jon Stallworthy. For the next 20 years Jacky oversaw publication of one of the most distinguished poetry lists in the UK, nurturing the poets who became her friends. It was a job she loved and for which she was greatly admired.
In 1998, however, OUP decided to axe the list. She told the Independent newspaper: “It’s an act of vandalism … you can’t sell the whole list like a sack of potatoes.”
Despite loud support from John Carey, Hermione Lee, Craig Raine and many others, OUP was adamant – the list was to go and 26 poets had to find new publishers.
There followed some unsettling times when her marriage came to an end, but after a year teaching English literature in Japan, Jacky moved into a beautiful flat in Blackheath and became an active grandmother to two boys, one of whom was a chorister at Temple Church in central London, a place she loved and which gave full expression to her delight in music and poetry.
Jacky is survived by her son, Ben, two grandsons, Jake and Oscar, and her sister, Liz.
