"Some of the most violent and striking imagery here concerns eyes, as do some of the most beautiful and salving." Steven Matthews on John Burnside and Ciaran Carson • Poetry Review (pdf)

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"The experience exploded into the 4,000 lines of her new novel-in-verse, 'A Hospital Odyssey,' a trek in which her alter ego travels the netherworlds of disease, death, cells, 'designer strings of enzymes,' stem cells and endless hospital corridors, elevator shafts and basements." Cynthia L Haven on Gwyneth Lewis • San Francisco Chronicle

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"[A]s Theory, from Derrida and Deleuze to Adorno and Habermas, came to dominate the discourse of the various Language Poetry journals, Creeley came to protest, less in print than in private conversation, that theory—dry, intellectual, impersonal—was the enemy of poetry, that he himself was just a 'simple' lyric poet who looked to experience and to tradition for inspiration." Marjorie Perloff on Robert Creeley • Electronic Book Review

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"This happened outside of my intention and even my attention, for the figures we call forth from the imagination are not ours to control." Eleanor Wilner • Cortland Review

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"The friendship was, indeed, more imaginary than real. The conversation was largely in Lowell's head, but he was thinking about Pound constantly, talking to him in his poems. And the idea of Pound, with his fierce dedication to the art of poetry, his attempt to include the whole world in his poems, provided Lowell with a useful model for his later work (especially his Notebook 1967-68), with its rambling and allusive capaciousness." Jay Parini on influence • Chronicle of Higher Education

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"Whatever we owe other people, at home and beyond, we owe something—some time and attention—to such poems too." Stephen Burt makes a point out of 'The Point' • Poetry Foundation

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"Maybe it’s about being untethered from reality, being let go from reality, from family, from home, from self, in the moments of making a poem." A conversation with Heather Christle, Hannah Gamble, Matthew Rohrer, Zachary Schomburg, and Matthew Zapruder • Gulf Coast

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"We might go even further with the serious play on numbers and do our multiplication. Three sections of 51 poems means there are 153 poems in Until Before After. In mathematics, 153 is the 17th triangular number. That is, 153 can be arranged as an equilateral triangle with 17 of its numbers on each side...It is a book constructed with an intelligent complexity that leads to the purest of poetic simplicity. Even by Carson’s high standards, it is a wonderful achievement." Colin Graham • Irish Times

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"From the end of the 19th, to the 20th and 21st centuries, the new emphasis will be on artistic movements that foreground process over personality." Claudia Keelan • American Poetry Review

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"Their studies on the effects of ethylene gas are of particular interest. It gives off a sweetish fragrance, which “can be detected in the atmosphere in concentrations as low as 700 parts per million.” This corresponds exactly to the delightful scent (eujwdiva) “resembling the odor of the most exquisite and expensive perfume” noted by Plutarch (437c–d) as being wafted on occasion from the adyton to the waiting area. It is lighter than air, which would at once explain the Pythia’s being mounted on a high tripod in an enclosed area to get the maximum benefit from it." Peter Green on the Delphic Oracle • Arion (pdf)

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"Buffam has an intriguing way of toggling back and forth between the coolly cerebral and the emotionally direct, with offhand ease. It's a kind of unbalancing act—from one line to the next, a reader doesn't know what to expect." Barbara Carey on new Canadian poetry • The Toronto Star

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"I have also taken Yeats’s cryptic poem “Three Movements” as a motto for the course, to indicate that modern poets felt that something in their circumstances was indeed amiss: “What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?”" Denis Donoghue on the little modern magazines • New Criterion

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"Ezekiel, part of the now-vanished Marathi-speaking Bene Israel Jewish community of Bombay, “represents the opposite of the Hindiizing, peasant-idealizing, Soviet-sympathizing nationalist cultural assertion of the government and many intellectuals” in post-Independence India." Michael Scharf on Ezekiel, Kolatkar, Mehrotra, Moraes and 60 Indian Poets • Coldfront

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"It is in his brilliant responses to such particular instances, rather than in his apprehensions of philosophical or theological wholeness, that I find Eliot at his most impressive as a critic." Frank Kermode • LRB

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"Rather than offer a wry smile to humanity, he smiles wryly at himself. "At the Butler Arms" concerns the island of Sceilig Mhichíl and its religious community, which survived six centuries almost untouched by the outside world; but the poem also glances at the fervent aesthetic beliefs of the poet's own youth: "No going back, // is there, to that wild hush of dedication, / to the solitude, the intense belief . . ."" Paul Batchelor on Derek Mahon • The Guardian

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"Paterson flirts with the reader, though that flirtation seems sometimes to be less courtship than corrida, the reader charging into empty air while the steely point drives home between the shoulder blades." A.E. Stallings on Don Paterson and Marie Ponsot • Poetry

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"Perhaps Lowell's verse incorporates too much of what his artistic life professed at length in the way of gratitude and affection: all "true Friendship", and a disabling of "Opposition". In that sense, maybe Hillian sourness achieves more than Lowellian blandishment." Peter McDonald • Poetry Matters

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"Comparing the poems in Eliot’s first book, Prufrock and other Observations (mostly written before 1915), with those in the 1919–20 volumes, it looks as if a harsh, oblique light had been turned on his world. Contour stands out with a cartoon sharpness; the gulfs between words have deepened." Eric Griffiths • TLS

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"Too easily submerged by the more dramatic renovations of imagism, he was, paradoxically, an innovative poet who quietly fulfilled the old, elusive Romantic doctrine of humble attentiveness to Everyman." Carol Rumens on Edwin Arlinton Robinson • The Guardian

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"Most of the new poems in Apple Trees reflect on Hass’s style by changing it, inverting expectations, complicating them, weighing style against anti-style." Adam Plunkett • TNR

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"In Gunn’s own words, what a poet has to learn is that 'he has inherited a genre onto which it is still possible for the whole of experience to bear: the body of his work should not be a collection of phenomena or of beautiful things, but should add up to a comment on existence just as much as the body of a novelist’s work.'" Tess Taylor • Boston Review

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"The poems display a casual intelligence and lyric straightforwardness similar to certain essays—those by Alain de Botton and Lawrence Weschler come to mind—that unfold with relative ease yet educate the reader in the acts of attentiveness to and pleasure in the everyday." Conchitina Cruz on L. Lacambra Ypil • POC

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"We could simply write poems in solitude all our days and hope that sometime after our death, our genius is discovered and unleashed upon the world. That is the path of the True Genius; they come along every once in a while, like albino roses or rabbits with antlers." Jim Behrle • Poetry Foundation

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"The strength of [Hill's] verse derives from a sense of the historical and the day-to-day practical responsibilities of a language that is tantamount to an obsession with nuance, and with precision." Dîpti Saravanamuttu on Geoffrey Hill • Jacket

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"This is a book of turning away from all that is modish in literature, from “the deliberate delight in incoherence, the whiff of chaos / off the first page of some new book” and toward his fit audience, however few." Karl Kirchwey on Derek Walcott • New York Times

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"[F]raming Australian poets in transverse rubrics might bring more notice to poets with an explicit consciousness of the potential betrayals of language . . . yet who retain a firm sense of a lyric speaker." Nicholas Birns on Australian Poetry • Salt Magazine

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"Poetry is in the details, we usually say, but so is cruelty." Charles Simic on Heimrad Bäcker • NYR Blog

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"This delight in language play from line to line is a feature of Welsh prosody. We see it there in the internal rhyme on "boughs" and "about" in lines 1 and 2, or in "hail" and "heydays" in lines 4 and 5, as a kind of technical delayment, or withholding, which is at the heart of Dylan Thomas's formal method." Paul Muldoon on Dylan Thomas • Poetry Daily

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"There is some kind of notoriety slowly building up out there." Andrea Brady on the Cambridge School • Cambridge Literary Review (pdf, scroll down)

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"Even the more successful poems, such as some of the summer lyrics, pale in comparison with earlier work. There just isn’t enough of Hass’s discipline and thoughtful focus to satisfy high expectations. Kay Ryan’s collection, The Best of It, is vastly different in tone, approach, and style." Elizabeth Lund on Robert Hass and Kay Ryan • Christian Science Monitor

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"[Anne Carson] applies the habits of classical scholarship—the linguistic rigor, the relentless search for evidence, the jigsaw approach to scattered facts—to the trivia of contemporary private life." Sam Anderson • New York Books; "If Nox were shown to be entirely made up, we'd feel cheated: It matters that Milton's "Lycidas" commemorates the drowned Edward King, that Tennyson's "In Memoriam" honors a real Arthur Hallam. These are great works of art, but they are also testimonies, memorials." Michael Dirda • Washington Post

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"To be coddled in New York City as a poet is to be killed slowly." Daniel Nester • The Morning News

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