“'Classic Poems' loom in the text like roadblocks: there’s Seamus Heaney on the bogland, Derek Mahon in the churchyard, Paul Muldoon contemplating the hay." Tim Keane on The New North • Rain Taxi

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"Many people’s initial reaction is of perplexity and annoyance at its declining to resolve into sense." Simon Morley on John Ashbery • TLS

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"Every now and then someone asks me, 'Who are the best poets writing today?' My answer? 'I have no idea.' Nor do I believe that anyone else does." David Alpaugh • Chronicle of Higher Education

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"I wonder if this is what the crowd of male critics who have been oinking appreciatively since Poems was released last year feel when they read Seidel." Molly Young on Frederick Seidel • Poetry

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"What this well-described still life teaches is how framing an image is authoritarian in nature." G Christopher Williams on Wallace Stevens • Pop Matters

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"Jack Butler Yeats has been 'absurdly eclipsed' by his more famous brother, William Butler." Alex Niven on Cal Bedient and the Yeats brothers • The Oxonian Review

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"At midnight on October 8, 2009, about 50 people gathered on the sidewalk before Baltimore’s Westminster Church." Abigail Deutsch on Edgar Allan Poe • Poetry

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"The bats are the philosophers, the masters of via negativa." Rosanna Warren on Louise Glück • The New Republic

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"The great inventor of the archaic was, in Davenport’s view, Ezra Pound, whose 'daedalian art' produces a 'golden honeycomb,' in which the Homeric gods, the Eleusian mysteries, the earliest Chinese sages and poets, and Pound’s own friends and enemies inhabit one and the same cosmos." Marjorie Perloff on Guy Davenport • Sibila

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"I think most readers of poetry can tell from the opening lines of a book if it’s a book they want to read more of, just as most of us make a decision about seeing a movie from its trailer." Joan Houlihan • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"It was only a trip to Armenia in 1930 that restored him to real things and people." Andrew McCulloch on Osip Mandelstam • TLS

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"It could be that an international vault will have to be established for poetry, to insure the renewal of the greatest variety of voices, of lines capable of challenging the uniformity of thought." C.D. Wright • Lana Turner Journal

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"Exerting a more persuasive claim than the timid and hesitant modernity of postwar Ireland, the power of myth has continued to inform the poet's imagination." Sean O'Brien on Eilean Ni Chuilleanain • The Guardian

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"Poetry is to prose what a single malt is to a pint of good beer." Robin Robertson in conversation with Marc Vincenz • Open Letters Monthly

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"Yet there are few real poets that have made a mark on the national spirit, although a lot of authors have written verses and a lot of them continue to do so." Jairo Guzman on Colombian poetry • Poetry International

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"But did you know about the redemption needed at the end of a poem?" Jenny Diski • LRB

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"I’ve always got antennae up. They’re filtering the static. When something stands out as odd and maybe troubling, they record it for later." Rae Armantrout in conversation with Daniel Benjamin • Chicago Weekly Online

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"He once wrote a Ballade for the Duke of Orleans, responding in English to the Duke’s offer, made in 1457, of a prize for the best ballade with the refrain: Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine (‘I die of thirst, here at the fountain’s side’)." D.M. Black on Richard Wilbur • The Dark Horse

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"A lot of people apparently don’t like being a type; I like being a type. I wouldn’t like to be only a type, but it’s fine for me to be a septuagenarian bald English lover of Bob Dylan." Sir Christopher Ricks in conversation with Kit Toda • Literateur

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"Her most striking virtues, shared in such measure by few other poets around, remain her unfettered wackiness, her lush appreciation of forms, her blend of little nuggets of ironic truthiness with truly nugatory trash, and her sonic as well as intellectual adventurousness." Will Cordeiro on Susan Wheeler • Jacket

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"I like the danger; the short line has so much edge. I can’t bury a weak word." Kay Ryan • Drunken Boat

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"Will Harvard now offer to replace the condemned hardcover edition free of charge, particularly in the university libraries on whose shelves that calamity now sits, waiting to ambush any unwary young scholar?" William Logan on Frost's notebooks • The New Criterion

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"On a superficial level Mr. Hoagland’s poems — he writes in an alert, caffeinated, lightly accented free verse — resemble those of many writers in what one is tempted to call the Amiable School of American Poets, a group for which Billy Collins serves as both prom king and starting point guard." Dwight Garner on Tony Hoagland • New York Times

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"Humility, absent from The Divine Image, is clearly not the usual Christian virtue for Blake. It appears as a diseased growth which, in modern psychoanalytical terms, might equal 'repression' or 'denial'." Carol Rumens on William Blake • The Guardian

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"A real poem, that is, lives with the possibility that it might not be any good, and no amount of training, or canny targeting, can ever lessen that." Peter McDonald • Verse Palace

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"One idea of poetic ambition sees not the poem, but the book of poems, as a single extended imaginative act, demanding of the reader the same sustained attention that, say, a novel requires, and providing commensurate rewards. It is precisely this sustained attention that the new technologies—those by which we are encouraged to learn and feel and communicate—so routinely defeat." Karl Kirchwey on Louise Glück • Philadelphia Inquirer

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"Too few poets write criticism. Too few venture beyond their tribal affiliations." Carol Rumens and James Sutherland-Smith discuss the state of British poetry • The Bow Wow Shop

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"Rather, give me the comic. Frission of the unexpected against expectation, the lyric twisted into a blague." Ravi Shankar • The Quarterly Conversation

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"Jeremy Reed has been trying to get me along to see his warehouse of books for weeks. I’ve finally succumbed to another book-fix, the foxed underworld of signed poetry first editions." Chris McCabe • Hand + Star

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"By that token, a poet would be an endangered species, condemned to live without a spine. Maybe that’s why he so often has recourse to alibis. When questioned, he refers to his other occupations." Durs Grunbein • Poetry

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"As new poetries assert that there can be both 'homage and reappropriation,' new methods of translation arise and language is stretched, tested, discovered, and discovered anew." Ellen Welcker • The Quarterly Conversation

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