My friend Glenn Storhaug, who has died aged 78, was a poet, publisher and environmental campaigner. In the late 1970s he set up his own Five Seasons Press.
Having taught himself typesetting, Glenn developed an enthusiasm for the American poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, whose work he wished to promulgate. With the paper supplier John Purcell he was also instrumental in the development and production of a good quality recycled paper.
Glenn made hand-printed editions of Wales Visitation by Ginsberg (1978), Good Wild Sacred by Snyder (1984) and a "Wendell Berry primer for British readers" (1987). Other poets he published included Fleur Adcock; Seamus Heaney, Gillian Clarke and others in The Kilpeck Anthology (1981); and Michael Horovitz, in Midsummer Morning Jog Log (1985), with drawings by Peter Blake.
In later years he produced special editions for the Hay literary festival (2004-19), and the Versopolis dual-language chapbooks for the Ledbury poetry festival (2015-24).
Born in Purley, then in Surrey, Glenn was the son of Elsa Hope, who was half Swedish, and Leif Storhaug, a Norwegian ship-broker. After boarding at Lancing college, he studied English at St Catherine's College, Oxford, where I met him, and which in the 1960s was a hive of non-traditional thought under the mastership of Alan Bullock. After graduation in 1968, experiments in poetry led Glenn to work at Better Books on Charing Cross Road, London, under the aegis of the performance poet Bob Cobbing.
In 1970 Glenn hitchhiked across the US and spent three months living in a cabin in the Norwegian mountains, where he wrote poetry influenced by Zen thought. In 1971 he married Liz Andrews, with whom in 1975 he set off on a merchant ship for Ghana. There Liz worked as a midwife while Glenn taught, wrote poetry and panned for gold.
Returning to Britain the following year, the couple moved to Madley, Herefordshire, where Glenn set up Five Seasons Press. He and Liz divorced in 1995, but in later life became close friends.
In 1983 he was one of a group of founding parents of Hereford Waldorf school (now the Steiner Academy Hereford). His son, Finn, aged four, attended the first kindergarten, followed by his daughter, Anna, two years later. As an active member of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, Glenn took part in many campaigns to save Hereford's green spaces. In the 2017 and 2019 general elections he acted as agent for Diana Toynbee, the Green party candidate for Hereford and South Herefordshire.
Glenn avoided publishing his own work, saying: "There's enough verbose stuff out there already." However, in 2024, two years after his diagnosis with prostate cancer and in response to a request from his daughter, he produced a boxed collection of loose-leaf poetry, prose and images that trace back over 50 years, titled Root Prose Poem Fruit.
Finn and Anna survive him, as do his grandchildren, Max, Milo and Sol.