Faber and Faber poetry page layouts

For all his faults and flaws, Seamus Heaney, "Opened Ground", 1998, did not deserve the orphans and widows of his publisher.

Time and again a stanza is broken only to end on a partial page.

The publishers do not know that when a page will be a few lines short, either to increase the spacing between stanzas or to suppress the page number (if it is at the foot) or replace that number with a simple arrow or to place a discrete arrow in the right margin or ...

Anything of that sort must be better than these fractured verses.

Perhaps it could be offered as what one gains by purchasing the hard-covers edition (electronic publishing from smart markup rather than mere SGML should not have a problem in providing for that luxury.)

Cannot they not see that this manner of lazy page layout is as flawed as perverting the order of stanzas?

Not as bad, of course, as U Cal Press placing the titles of at least one poem on every page with no bracket style to indicate "here it ends" or "here it begins" - as though the page is not before the reader.  Poetry is not fiction in paragraphs; poems are not pages of fiction.

And yet so much careful attention to wrappers, dust covers, jackets, ...

The Faber and Faber does also mis-number the preceding roman numeral pages in adding an extra blank page (appreciated by me for my notes) in doing the gathering for the bookbinding.  Page -I and page 0 may be quite fitting for the funereal in Heaney.