On Christmas Day Dennis Greig passed away after a valiant fight with the HHT that has plagued him and his family, and cancer.

Dennis said that he and his wife were proud to be poetry midwives and my goodness, they were magnificent at it. When Dennis accepted my first book of 17s in 2010, I was putting a cruel marriage behind me and with Lapwing I felt safe for the first time in a long while. Dennis was unique in the depth of his support for all his poets. Poetically, if he saw a glimmer in us, he nurtured it, always gently, selflessly. Personally, where it was needed he did the same, constant and fatherly. I’d never thought of myself as a poet but he managed to give me the confidence to say I am one. I will always be grateful.  

Dennis was a poet himself, recording Northern Ireland’s euphemistically named ‘Troubles’ in Belfast with intelligence and lyrical sensitivity. Poetry was rising from the rubble of civil war then and Dennis was one of the important writers at its heart. In 1988 Dennis and his wife Rene (a magnificent artistic force in her own right in theatre, script writing, dance and inter-sectarian work) set up Lapwing Publications. Over the years they produced over 500 distinctively beautiful slim volumes on high quality paper, each white or cream cover with one of Dennis’s chosen thumbnail pictures on the front, all hand pressed in Belfast. I recognised one across a crowded poetry reading in east Kent last summer, unmistakably a Lapwing book, a gem.

Damien Smyth of Arts Council NI, a fine poet himself, has described Lapwing as ‘a press only marginally second (in Ireland) to Salmon Publishing in the volume of its output and sturdiness of its platform for new voices’. Both Lapwing and Salmon pride themselves on the high proportion of women poets they publish.

Rene was undoubtedly Dennis’s engine and they had one of those powerful marriages that gathers, warms and heartens anyone near them.

Dennis deserves his rest now. The past year has been impossibly hard for him and his loved ones. My condolences to them all. No publisher ever worked harder, for Lapwing and for his poets, and Lapwing’s achievement will always shine, not just in the Irish and English-speaking poetry worlds but worldwide. I am proud to be part of it.