"Only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack." David Orr • The New York Times

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"This is an anthology that aims to recharge its subject, to demarginalise it, or at least to demystify it." Nicholas Lezard on The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations • The Guardian

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"A sense of performance, rather than of confession, runs through almost every word he wrote." Colin Burrow on John Donne • London Review of Books

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"They are among the most original elegies ever written, in feeling and in the handling of language and verse forms." Claire Tomalin on Thomas Hardy • The Guardian

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"So much recent engagement has been focused on awards and prizes that any insightful consideration of form and shape and the constructed-ness of poems seems to have fallen by the wayside." Paul Farley • The Guardian

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"During the last half century, no poem has been able to match the prominence and resonance achieved by Howl." John Palattella • BookForum

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"His zesty use of idiom has always tacked riskily close to cliché." Robert Potts on Simon Armitage • The Guardian

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"Musicians don’t follow roads. Most of them have much more eclectic musical interests than their fans do." Louis Menand on Bob Dylan • The New Yorker

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"Their wit and precision sneak up on you with quiet inevitability." Elizabeth Willis on the poems of Lorine Niedecker • Academy of American Poets

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"Poetry must meet a standard of pleasure as well as profundity if it is to recover its place in American culture." John Barr • Poetry

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"On the high trapeze, the Flyer may be the one who draws the applause from the crowd, but it’s the editorial Catcher who times the flight." Alan Garner • The Times

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"Nathaniel Mackey's poems work by exploiting the slippages and stutters of ordinary language." John Palattella • The Nation

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