"His ear is as good as his eye, the ferocity of which makes him quite a frightening friend." Nicholas Shakespeare on Murray Bail's notebooks • The Sunday Telegraph

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"Even the best of us can lose our footing in troubled times. The crucial thing is to keep after the truth." Timothy Snyder on Milosz's Legends of Modernity • The Nation

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"So light triumphs, yes." Don Coles • Globe and Mail

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"I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: 'Last throes could be a violent last throe, or a placid and calm last throe. Look it up in the dictionary.' " What I heard about Iraq in 2005, by Eliot Weinberger • London Review of Books

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"Under its new editor, Poetry has done what long seemed impossible: It has reclaimed its place at the center of American poetry." Adam Kirsch • The New York Sun

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"We need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are." Louis Menand • The New Yorker

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"With its extraordinary speed, scope and audacity, Anne Winters's poetry both expresses our time and resists it." Robert Pinsky • The Nation

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"Kay Ryan's tiny poems turn out to be full of color and argument." David Kirby • The New York Times

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ALSO: Moniza Alvi • Rubn Daro • June Jordan

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"Shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books." Philip Roth talks to Martin Krasnik • The Guardian

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"How are we to account for the phenomenon of Rilke's appeal?" Sean O'Brien • Poetry Review

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"The interesting thing in life is not having an idea, but realizing it." Peter Watson talks to Deborah Solomon • The New York Times Magazine

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"The most notable quality of Kenneth Koch's lifetime of poetry is not jokiness but lyricism." Emily Nussbaum • The New York Times

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"Progress in art," he wrote, "does not consist in expanding one's limitations, but in knowing them better." Julian Barnes on Braque • London Review of Books

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"Seldom has glamour cohabited with intelligence so forcefully and so seductively." Peter Porter on Rochester • TLS

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"Georges Perec hands the world back to his readers, but it is not quite the one we're accustomed to; it is ever so much wider, and an odd, mysterious, hospitable place." James Gibbons • BookForum

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"Our minds are conditioned by the wrong kind of nature poem, the kind that leaves us comfortable, melancholy, inert. Nostalgic. Dishonest." Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes • The Guardian

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"The ubiquitous designation 'Holocaust poet' has eclipsed the role of sound, rhythm, tone and spatial form in the lyric of Paul Celan." Marjorie Perloff • Boston Review

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"Wislawa Szymborska's lightness is never denial or indifference; it is a subtle means of defiance." Cynthia Haven • San Francisco Chronicle

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"The sound of a poem is as crucial to its meaning as the achievements of the words on the page." Andrew Motion writes in the TLS on The Poetry Archive

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