"That insistence on perfection is what makes Elizabeth Bishop not just a cherishable poet, but an exemplary one." Adam Kirsch • TLS

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"To reread Howl is to think of a time when poetry clearly mattered." Stephen Burt • Slate

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"I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings." Adam Zagajewski talks to Cynthia Haven • Poetry Foundation

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"For anyone with creative aspirations, Beckett remains the measure of what it means to stake one’s life on art." Justin Beplate • TLS

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“O, I love Queneau,” she gushed, much to my surprise. “He’s a wonderful writer. But, of course, we couldn’t possibly do a review of his work!” Douglas Messerli • Green Integer

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"What these uncollected works lay bare for me is how much emotion there was in Bishop's poems to start with, which her endless tinkering tended to obscure in the end." Charles Simic • The New York Review of Books

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"Roy Fisher throughout his career has learned and taken advantage of 'what it is possible to do, freed from readership'." August Kleinzahler • London Review of Books

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"This bloated, earnest, largely mediocre new Oxford takes up a lot of space on the shelf without providing a clear view of our moment." William Logan on The Oxford Book of American Poetry • The New York Times

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"An unembittered moral clarity gives these poems their simple directness." Maya Jaggi on Chinua Achebe • The Guardian

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"His ease with form and his fluency are among Heaney's burdens." Clive Wilmer • The New Statesman

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"There was Creeley the bohemian and the dyed-in-the-wool Yankee, the approachable and the avant-garde, the laconic writer and the blue-streak talker, the gentle pigeon-raiser and the high-strung Young Turk." D. H. Tracy • The New York Times

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"Why has our age become so enamored of a poet who almost to the end of her life required a special taste?" William Logan on Elizabeth Bishop • The New Criterion

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"I thought it was okay for poems in some crucial way to be part of the world of everyday entertainment, and that it would do the academy no great harm to acknowledge this." Bill Manhire talks to Nick Twemlow • Poets And Writers

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"In the beginning you write for the high of finishing it, of getting through. Now the reward is feeling that you're on the right track and can work at it." Seamus Heaney talks to Sam Leith • The Daily Telegraph

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"Down with the poetry cheerleaders, I say! Readers don’t need to be talked down to." Michael Schmidt • The StAnza lecture 2006

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"The poem is both the winding road and the wild horse that gallops past us as we read." Andrew Johnston • Introduction to Best New Zealand Poems 2005

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"Why do we feel compelled to elevate Elizabeth Bishop while simultaneously worrying that we're raising her too high?" David Orr • The New York Times

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