"What they call poetics—from Callimachus and Horace all the way to Cavafy, Eliot, and Rilke—is a game of hide-and-seek: defensive, cryptic, and clandestine through and through." Durs Grunbein • Poetry Daily

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"Although a much-ridiculed term, political correctness has had a devastating effect on the literary culture in Britain. Arguably, the internal self-censorship and deception it has engendered are making literature, at least as previously understood, almost impossible." Paul Sutton • Stride

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"If [C.K.] Williams’s love for Whitman, so evident all through this winning book, leads him to invite the reader chiefly into a survey of Whitmanian ethics, he comes to that end through an enlightening and often moving commentary on the younger Whitman’s dazzle and gloom, humor and speculation." Helen Vendler • New York Times Book Review

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"As the narrator assures us, in a disgusting passage about a giant tarantula creeping snugly close to its sleeping victim, 'we are no longer inside narration . . . Alas! We have now arrived in the real.'" Roger Cardinal on Le Comte de Lautréamont • TLS

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"[Gunnar Ekelöf's] work discards, it peels away layer after layer of distanciation, of cultural sediment, of simplicity, of expressive cowardice." Steven Fowler • Nth Position

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"Poetry, even when it’s snubbed by the broader culture, has no expiration date." Dana Jennings • New York Times

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"Poets study the work of pornographers, economists, and real-estate developers. They know a poem must satisfy the needs of a consumer, and that the needs of a consumer must be defined in an abstract and generalized manner, without too much reference to specific persons, in order to facilitate the production cycle." Stan Apps • Action Yes

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"Cavafy’s erotic eye casts a soft glow, perhaps a postcoital glow, on mundane things. Durrell’s wanton eye, on the other hand, tends to pick out squalor or depravity." Bruce Redwine on Alexandria • Arion

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"[George Oppen's] poetic structure . . . mimes the fits and starts by means of which his consciousness comes to terms with its new condition." Marjorie Perloff • Sibila

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"Fisher’s control over the almost fugal movement in his writing shows no sign of diminishing. Published to coincide with his eightieth birthday, this is a lovely late volume and an ideal introduction to his work as a whole." Ian Pople on Roy Fisher's Standard Midland • Manchester Review

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"'It’s been 20 days with no sign of friendship or love. If this doesn’t change soon, I think I’ll emigrate. Meanwhile, and filled with resignation, I read novels and go to the movies: two absurdities.'"" Francisco Aragón on Gerardo Diego • Jacket

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"At a time when 'the end of the book' is a subject of endless debate, Nox feels both very new and very old; it combines the precious heft of text with the fleeting nature of a casual snapshot, a scrawled note, or a digital image." Jess Row • The New Republic

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"It was early in the thirteenth-century that this 'monument’s monument,' as Dante Gabriel Rossetti praised it, and 'pure form,' as Edith Wharton once said, 'like some chalice of old time,' was born at the court of the enlightened Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Sicily." Jeannie Vanasco • Open Letters

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"As for all your latest Mayan discoveries and poems, I want to hear every word of it if you want to transmit it, or tell it when we meet, but don’t expect me to get excited by anything any more." Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg (1954) • Granta

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“'Nox' is a luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of an elegy, which is why it evokes so effectively the felt chaos and unreality of loss." Meghan O'Rourke • The New Yorker

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"Here too we confront a blank." David Wheatley on the letters of Louis MacNeice • TLS

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"It would be easy to be lulled by those rich sounds, "Twilight, gloaming". However, the prospect of a gentle, if unconventional, pastoral poem is swiftly dispelled." Carol Rumens on Jen Hadfield • Guardian

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"Conversely Oppen, it is important to note, is absolutely not interested in replicating speech in his poems. His project aimed at a reconfiguration of lyric voice into an order that essentially avoided the allure of verbal rapidity and fluency." Michael Kindellan on George Oppen • The Wolf

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"But ‘Leda and the Swan’ is the great modern shudder poem. Here the shudder is an erotic response to apocalypse, to a rape that is also some sort of annunciation. Orgasm is accompanied, or represented, by cosmic destruction, the broken wall and burning roof and tower of Troy, ‘and Agamemnon dead’." Frank Kermode on the shudder • LRB

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"'Poetry has become too much of a business,” Mahon repeats. “We have to guard against the commodification of the arts, and particularly the commodification of poetry.'" Derek Mahon interviewed • Irish Times

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"The book as a platform to leap off into thought. And this, then, is the real social space of conceptual writing: the conversation." Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation • Jacket

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"[The] examination of the lingoes of nightlife and lowlife—including nursery rhymes, cant, ballads, spells, hexes, and tracts—ultimately creates a rambunctious, infectious demotic tide, parasitical upon the high-brow interlopers." Joyelle McSweeney • Boston Review

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"I’ll bet the formalist Marilyn Hacker and the Language poet Ron Silliman are pretty close, if not identical, in their politics." Daisy Fried • Poetry

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"I was trying out the idea that here I would not be a travel poet, but I might be a global poet whose autonomy was undermined by larger forces." Ange Mlinko • Poetry

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"Auden’s distancing himself from Yeats was a definite rejection of the notion of the poet as Bard, as inspired singer of irrefutable truths." Gregory Dowling • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"There is no end to the string of paradoxes that arise from the biographies of Borges and "Borges."" Susan Stewart on Jorge Luis Borges • The Nation

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"There is even a story that Fisher's recurring periods of writer's block were triggered by his alarm at actually reaching an audience (a challenge, like the driving test, that few poets face)." Paul Batchelor on Roy Fisher • Guardian

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"Ever since Auden stepped off the boat in New York back in 1939, Ireland and Britain have regularly lost many of their best poetic minds to our sweet land of university professorships and well-endowed sinecures. Think of Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon. Our gain. But Donaghy reverts to the earlier Modernist pattern of the American who finds success abroad." Michael Dirda on Michael Donaghy • Poetry

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"Raworth's restless style catches sparks from the 20th century's surrealist and imagist revolutions. But it is not a crank-handled avant-garde museum piece. The desire to versify thought has been the cause of poetic innovation in English ever since Sir Thomas Wyatt in the 16th century." Jeremy Noel-Tod • New Statesman

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"An artist who was intimidated by nothing." James Longenbach on Emily Dickinson • The Nation

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"Reading [Michael] Palmer, one finds—in place of the deadened, predictable litany of re-hashed scholarship—the continual wonderment of someone who is amazed at how people from very different times and places are working together in poetics-politics." Vincent Katz • Jacket

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"Throughout her professional life, Carson has attempted, with difficulty she says, to capture in English this “passionate slow surface of a Roman elegy”. While Nox includes her English translation of poem 101, the book is most of all remarkable for its other forms of expression, the physical as well as the linguistic, including an individualist etymology of the poem’s every word, simultaneously professorial and passionate in a way that Catullus, that greatest of Roman innovators, might very plausibly have approved of himself." Peter Stothard on Anne Carson • TLS

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