"And maybe it’s my own liking for gossip, but I suspect readers would also be pleased to know that the last, untitled poem in the book was probably written, by the then itinerant Baxter, on the wall of a friend’s house just six days before his death." Bill Manhire on James K Baxter • Poetry London

---

"Paterson says poetry in the UK has rarely been more buoyant. But aren't poetry sales declining? No, he says firmly. "It sells perfectly well – it sells far better than many novels and outsells an awful lot of first novels."" Don Paterson and others on the state of poetry • Guardian

---

"Recent contemporary poetry has manifested a deep distrust of the word; not only in the minimalism of much mainstream writing, but also the rending post-modernism of much of the language poetry. Haslam has no such distrust." Ian Pople on Michael Haslam • Manchester Review

---

---

"Keats’s T wang dillo dee is hilarious—all those people trying to hide their 'T wangs'! But it also is critical, especially of pomp and false solemnity, and the acquiescence embedded in an agreeable 'Amen.'" Michael Theune • Jacket

---

"His work suggests that poetry is a kind metempsychosis, a way of transmigrating thoughts to the mind of the reader, a way of recycling knowledge, an inherited autumnal harvest to be stored up for the future." Simon Pomery on Derek Mahon • Poetry Matters

---

"Mutual incomprehension is a threat to poetry, even if it is the product of passionate and largely successful revolt." Andrew Duncan • Argotist

---

"What is your favorite editing project and why?" Eileen Tabios culls responses from 43 poet-editors • Otoliths

---

"[T]here is something in [Ann] Lauterbach’s poetry that liberates the critic, allowing (or perhaps forcing) her or him to find a language that is appropriate to the freedoms she allows herself." Vincent Katz • Jacket

---

For [Tomas Tranströmer] the transitional states between sleep and waking, public and private, past and present, are so many entrances to what Robin Fulton calls 'a central space,' a space onto which the individual person, in his or her depths, opens as well." Bill Coyle • Contemporary Poetry Review

---

"[I]t’s probably sentimentality more than quaintness that we hate—sentimentality in the sense of reduced, simplified, spoon-fed 'emotion' for people who can’t be trusted/bothered to handle the complexity of real emotions." William Walsh in conversation with Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney • Kenyon Review blog

---

"In each work the objects, once placed in proximity to another thing, suggests something poetic." Katie Geha on Jess Collins • Poetry

---

"This deeply personal, dark meditation on death and memory justifies the nuttier projects on which Carson has lavished her talents." William Logan on Anne Carson, CK Williams, Don Paterson and others • New Criterion

---

"The challenge for the modernist long poem is that narrative and nobility or wisdom are no longer viable drivers of the unfolding structure, and have had to be replaced. What is then going to provide the transportation, the forward impulsion of the form and its necessary counterpart the reader?" Peter Middleton on the long poem • Jacket

---

"It is all about the rhythm of the perceptions, and out of the commonsense sound of prose his writing seeks to evolve a freshness and energy not unlike Bishop’s." Vidyan Ravinthiran • Poetry Matters

---

"He sets out to write about an actual city but to ‘dissolve’ its particulars and make them strange, until it becomes as much an inner perceptual field, as a post-industrial Midlands wasteland." August Kleinzahler on Roy Fisher • LRB

---

"It adds to the corpus of writing inspired by the event from a very early stage. Thomas Kinsella's long poem, Butcher's Dozen, was written as a white-hot response to the Widgery report, in appropriately Swiftian rhyming couplets." Roy Foster on the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday • Guardian

---

"The truth is that Walcott probably isn’t too bothered to have missed out on a quasi-public appointment with a meagre stipend in a land-locked English town." Alex Niven • Oxonian Review

---

"His work can be peppy or melancholy, twee or coarse, crammed or ambiguous, stark or long-winded, inscrutable or anxious to please, sometimes all in the same poem. In less nimble hands these divergent styles would feel like a car wreck, or at least a mess." Daniel Handler on James Schuyler • Believer

---

"To prefer to err on the side of homogenizing platitudes and motherhood statements rather than attempt to find diverse and polyphonic poetic forms, however flawed and provisional, that directly engage the intricate network of troubles that intersect in the Maguindanao Massacre . . . is to relinquish, all too easily, what one can offer in the communal effort to understand and revise the oppressive conditions that plague us, which in the poet’s case is the employment of words in the twin necessities of relentless scrutiny and long-term memory." Conchitina Cruz • High Chair

---

"If the form is his name, and his name is him, the contents of the form are the contents of his form--this is what's inside of him, this is what he contains." Bridget Lowe on the acrostic • Ploughshares blog

---

"A great many contemporary poems gravitate toward the fragment, and toward the fragment’s own form of brusque sentimentality...But Phillips makes his uncomfortable home in the sentence." Katie Peterson on Carl Phillips • Boston Review

---

"Even if one is not able to follow each and every signpost, there are considerable pleasures to be had in tracing a course through Porter's omnivorously learned and inquisitive mind." Adam Newey on Peter Porter's Selected Poems • Guardian

---

"McGuinness's slow, implacable rhythms, moving as though at shunting speed, enable us to savour a complex mixture of reactions, including contempt, melancholy, curiosity and gallows humour. WG Sebald, a great scrutineer of the railway terminus, may have travelled some of this ground before, but there is clearly a good deal at stake for McGuinness imaginatively." Sean O'Brien on Patrick McGuinness • Guardian

---

"I gravitate toward poems that occur as books, and it was French letters that brought home to me this possibility. Formally, such poems begin in unfolding and finish in the bodily gesture of unfurling. Or overflowing. Thus, they're based on excess, on the self's exceeding the self. The poem is the excess; it's the abundance that won't fit into the book, which makes the book necessary." Cole Swensen • Double Change

---

"The 'poet'? In the cultural (main-)stream of society, he or she is something like a municipal employee [. . .] Poet in the city, in the margins, incompetent in all things (since Ion, because of Socrates), slightly out of touch (often described as 'absent-minded'); powerless, not 'with it,' except at the epideictic fringe of occasional ceremonies, the poet will sometimes, for a brief while, feebly defend his or her rarefied employment." Michel Deguy • Sibila

---

"'My nerves vibrate very readily,' Hardy explained. 'My will to believe is perfect.' It's easy to see why the Poems of 1912–13 make such wide and imaginative use of haunting as a motif, especially for a poet who wants so badly to be haunted." Jeremy Axelrod on Thomas Hardy • Poetry

---

"Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom." Rick Prelinger • Absent

---

"Basil Bunting claimed it was 'easier to die than to remember'; Adcock scores the sand to defy the waves." Julian Stannard • Guardian

---

"Through poetic rhythm, arrangement, sound, and syntax, meaning is made—often outside of any concern for profit or utility. Whether this 'meaning' is socially liberating is unclear. I can think of certain poems/poets/historical times in which I could argue that it is socially liberating, others not so much. Which doesn’t mean that poetry is not a necessity." Jennifer Moxley in conversation with Jessica Murray • Memorious blog

---

"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

---

"William Carlos Williams tried to theorize free verse into something called a "variable foot"; Charles Olson tried to theorize it into a "composition by field"; Schuyler simply wrote the poems, and his view of a "various field" crystallizes his sense of style without pontification." Ange Mlinko on James Schuyler • The Nation

---

"One of the most admirable qualities of the men of 1922—to call them that for short—was their readiness to accept strong criticism from their friends without letting it damage the friendship." Denis Donoghue on Yeats, Eliot and Pound • Hudson Review

---