The mystery of poetry editing: from TS Eliot to John Burnside But, he says, expertise can be found in many places. For example, his colleague at Faber, Paul Keegan, is not a poet but still a distinguished poetry editor. Most important is that "an editor listens to an author tuning into their poems." Don Paterson is one of Hollis's most successful poets. His last collection, Rain, won the 2009 Forward Prize and he has twice won the TS Eliot. He is also the poetry editor at Picador, which had two contenders on this year's TS Eliot shortlist, including the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. I ask Paterson about Hollis as editor. "He's a fine poet with a miserably accurate eye," he says drily, adding that Hollis "always softens the really bad news with extravagant praise." He disagrees with Hollis about who is qualified to edit poetry. "A non-poet can't do a line-edit on a poem," he says. Paterson believes "it's pretty much essential" that they are also practitioners. Shaping poetry, argues Paterson, is distinct from editing prose since it "depends upon tiny shifts of sense and emphasis, context and connection"; a poem is more likely to be "fuelled by high emotion, or at least inspirations that are highly personal," and the author can easily lose perspective on what he or she has written. But is this so distinct from editing any piece of creative work? We don't expect fiction editors to be novelists. In fact, there is the danger of producing a set of poets who speak in your own voice - something Paterson acknowledges: "There have been notorious instances in the last 50 years of poets forging whole lists in their own image, and failing to notice." One of his recent successes was Rachael Boast, whose Sidereal won last year's Forward Prize for best first collection. Paterson honed the book with her for a number of years, which is "not unusual for a first book." Once their inner sense of what is valuable in their writing is better calibrated, he says, they don't require as much "intense feedback." How intense can it get? I'll make a long list of specific queries, and then fight about it with the author in the office or the pub or the British Library for three days while we go through each poem a line at a time. Sometimes the editor's job is to encourage rather than restrain. Paterson's fellow Scot Robin Robertson is another prize-winning poet (he won the 2006 Forward for Swithering) on the Picador list. Despite his experience, says Paterson, "he can be so savage with his own work you have to stay his hand, sometimes." He stops: "But there's this thing called author confidentiality..." "We have great old scraps," says Robertson, who, in turn, runs the poetry list at Jonathan Cape and edits John Burnside (this year's TS Eliot and Forward Prize winner). He makes some very good suggestions, about 50 per cent of which I accept. He takes the same position I do: if the writer wants to make a mistake badly enough he should be allowed to make it. Often Robertson finds himself creating a collection from the poet's disparate material. You do a tailoring job and make it look as elegant as you can. For some this takes more effort than for others. Michael Longley, the Irish nature poet, requires little more than adding the ISBN number. "I say I edit Longley, but I don't really," says Robertson, "I just pat him on the back." In the case of new poets, Robertson will happily hold them off publication for a long while, forcing rewrites and rethinks. "I can make myself a real nuisance," he says, adding, with surprising frankness, that there are some poets "who need me to write their poems for them." Is there something, dare I say it, Simon Cowell-esque about this kind of intervention? Robertson thinks not. One young poet he has recently helped (though not rewritten) is Sean Borodale. He is turning a pamphlet called Bee Journal - an account of being an apiarist - into a full-length collection. "It's extremely good," says Robertson, "but one problem was that it used almost no punctuation." The poems were written very fast and Robertson asked him to take another look. When Sean sat down and punctuated the whole thing he was delighted. That wasn't really my work: it was just somebody saying "try it this way."" Robertson and Paterson are clearly great friends. But is the poet-editor relationship different when the participants don't know each other well - or come from different backgrounds? While working with Ben Okri, Robertson confesses that he redid some of his Lagos patois. I hope it doesn't show that it was an Aberdonian who was doing it. The Mexican-British poet and editorial director of Carcanet, Michael Schmidt, is wary about such interventions. If you're publishing a Zimbabwean poet or a poet from India or New Zealand, they'll speak a language different from your own. There is a danger, he argues, of smothering their uniqueness by making them conform to standard English. "This is an issue between genders as well," he adds. Schmidt has been in the business for 40 years. I was delighted to learn that he commissioned the book currently on my bedside: CH Sisson's Dante translation from 1981. But must you be from the same cultural background to edit someone properly? A sensitive outsider can surely spot things a native might not. One anecdote Schmidt recounts shows how a clever editor can get around this problem by bringing one outsider to advise another. The South African poet Adam Schwartzman has been with Carcanet since his first collection, The Good Life, the Dirty Life and Other Stories, came out in 1995. Schmidt was initially keen but he sensed something not quite right; he set up a meeting between Schwartzman and the Australian Les Murray, one of Carcanet's biggest names. Murray advised him to use his own language, Afrikaans, specifically when naming a type of plant. "Adam felt liberated into his own language," says Schmidt, "just as Les uses the Australian idiom in his own poems." While poet-editors might be wary of imposing their own voice on their charges - for artistic or political reasons - an equally serious issue is whether editing hinders their own creativity. Paterson seems unworried: "I'm always impressed at how infantile and unreasonable and petulant I can still become with my own editor." Robertson, though, is less sanguine, saying that the aural traces of other people's poems can clutter your head; and Schmidt admits his production has dwindled in the years he has been running Carcanet. They must have occasion to wonder whether the sacrifice is worth it. The other unspoken problem of this closely interwoven - some might say incestuous - world is the potential for rivalry. Few people compete over even fewer rewards. What would happen if a poet-editor's protégé became more famous or (even worse) more brilliant than his mentor? I have heard rumours that one poet was excluded from a prize shortlist because a judge (also a poet) felt they had discovered them and was resentful of the other's superior commercial success. Fortunately on this year's TS Eliot list no poet was competing with his or her editor. Paterson seems relaxed when I ask him about such competition. He likens the feeling to that of a midwife jealously comparing a baby she has helped into the world with her own child. It really is the one time you can allow yourself to get shamelessly chuffed. When they're up for prizes, I get more nervous than they do.