The poet Arnold Rattenbury died on 26 April 2007 at the age of 85. With his friends E.P. Thompson and G.M.Matthews, the Shelley scholar, Rattenbury became a committed Marxist while still at public school, like them joined the Communist Party in the run-up to the Second World War (in which they all fought), and among his closest friends were numbered the Marxists Edgell Rickword (published by Carcanet), with whom he worked on the communist arts paper, Our Time, Randall Swingler and Sylvia Townsend Warner (also published by Carcanet).

His first collection of poems, Second Causes, was publsihed by Chatto and Windus in 1969, and was followed by five further collections. Rattenbury was a passionate admirer of William Morris, and a poet, writes John Lucas, 'of great wit and learning', skills he brought to bear on his work as a designer of exhibitions. His brilliantly original Young Bert, about D.H. Larwence's early years, shown at the Castle Museum, Nottingham, in 1972, to inaugurate the city;s first annual festival, was followed by exhibitions on Cycling and Clowning, and in North Wales, where he and his wife, a native of Wales, lived from 1971, his love of the area led to 'Ardudwy: A Catalogie of Things Made by Hand on Farms, in Quarries and at Sea', in which, as he said, 'the exhibition wants to know how bodies lived that had the hands.' A last collection of poems, ingeniously playful articles made by skilled craftspeople in their off-duty hours) is due from Smokestack Books.