Michael Schmidt's career as a poet has advanced side by side with his career as a publisher. Even if he were not a prolific writer, his position as head of Carcanet Press and editor of PN Review would be enough to assure his high standing in the world of British letters.

Michael Norton Schmidt was born to American parents in Mexico City in 1947. His father, Carl Bernhardt Schmidt, was in his fifties when this last of his children was born. A versatile and enterprising man, Carl Schmidt had risen to captain in the U.S. Army in World War I and was an aviator before going into business. Both professionally and personally he was interested in agriculture; he introduced the Fuerte avocado to the United States. In Mexico he made a prosperous living in the oil business. Michael Schmidt's mother, Elizabeth Norton Hill Schmidt, was younger than her...