"The poem was instantly praised by the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who on Channel 4 News compared its power to that of Shakespearean tragedy." Mark Ford on Ted Hughes • NYRB

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"There's a loose-limbed, gangling quality to these poems, where one idea sparks another seemingly by accident of pun or homophone, or rhyme. It's no accident, of course, because this is a poet who is always firmly in control of where he's going." Adam Newey on Paul Muldoon • Guardian

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"It is startling to see how hard and how gingerly he struggled with poems that we now regard as etched in flint ("Church Going", say, or "The Whitsun Weddings")." Martin Amis on Philip Larkin • The Guardian

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"An anthology like this has long been desired, so it is a pity to see such an opportunity wasted." Michael O'Loughlin • Irish Times "An obsession with anthologies has an entirely deleterious effect on our poetic practice, but artists do worry about ‘who’s in, who’s out’ and the press release for this anthology claims it "redefines Irish verse"." Thomas McCarthy • Irish Examiner

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"It's Muldoon's fascination with what is difficult coupled with great feats of structural engineering that makes these poems worth reading, and some worth loving, even if beauty sometimes comes at the expense of understanding." Peggy Hughes • The Scotsman

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"[O]f course the thinkers drink, and the drinkers think, and [Andrei] Codrescu paints himself and all of poetry as a kind of grand thinking drinker, a drinking thinker." J.C. Hallman • The Quarterly Conversation

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". . . [I]t is [Susan] Howe’s readiness to sometimes eschew experiment that paradoxically makes her one of the most renowned experimental poets on both sides of the Atlantic." Dan Eltringham and Christopher Gatefield • Literateur

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"I believe that political poetry should be grounded in the image, in the five senses, in the concrete, and that serves as a barricade against the rhetorical, because political rhetoric is often too abstract." Martin Espada in conversation with Marc Vincenz • Open Letters Monthly

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"I highly value poems that are strong enough to survive even when they are completely detached from the surrounding reality in poetic subject and tone. A very strong poem, a lyrical poem, draws its strength from its perfection and can withstand such a reality." Czeslaw Milosz • Sibila

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"My teacher, a trifle dramatic, shouted, 'We cry at weddings! We cry at funerals! We do not cry in math class!' Crying while trying to untie Nox's knots would be like crying over long division (which I've come to accept is not a typical response)." Abigail Deutsch • Open Letters Monthly

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"During the Renaissance a lot could be forgiven if one had impeccable style, and Beccadelli sought out the best stylists on which to base his poems." Alastair Blanchard • The Australian

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"A prose poem is 'a small box where weird shit happens.'" Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek • Open Letters Monthly

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"But there was a seriousness about Soundings; a sense of not talking down to its readers. There was none of that excruciating attempt to get hip with the kids that can sometimes spoil anthologies of poetry for young people. 'Soundings' was old school." Joseph O'Connor on school anthologies • Sunday Independent

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"Moore and Ryan share a visceral distaste for the confessional, the default mode of most contemporary American verse." Patrick Kurp • Quarterly Conversation

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"[Kostas Ouranis] was one of the first poets to turn away from the idea of the 'Greek nation', the shining, mawkish historicity of nationalism, to look at society for its ills, though never suggesting a solution." Steven Fowler • Nth Position

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"Carson’s Collected is, by contrast, more overture than coda. Not content to rest on past successes and revisit old forms, Carson offers risky innovations with each new collection, allowing for new readings not only of Northern Ireland but of the poetic line itself." Heather Clark • Harvard Review

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"One division Crotty would like to downplay in his story of the nation is that between male and female." Clair Wills on a new anthology of Irish poetry • Irish Times

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"Human Chain is a book that is serious about its own visionary burden. Like Caolite inside his fairy hill, the poet remembers being in a dugout 'under the hill, out of the day / But faced towards the daylight, holding hands' where an imagined camera angle will 'Discover us against weird brightness.'" Peter McDonald • TLS

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"Poetry is love for a felt fact stated in sharpest, most agile and detailed lyric terms." Robert J. Bertholf on Susan Howe • Jacket

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"Poetry, it seems, steps in when science finds itself lost for words." Helen Mort on Shapcott, McGuinness and Petit • Poetry London

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"Greece is a country where culture is local and historical, where one can meet a person called Antigone or Euripides in the street. But then one can bump into a Jason or even a Homer in the United States and not make the connection. Modern Greek poets have struggled with this dual-identity." Evan Jones • New Criterion

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". . . [Y]et where most poets live by eye, [Seamus] Heaney likes to press the reader’s nose into the carnal stench of things." William Logan • New York Times

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"I have found myself wondering if poetry – in what it requires of us as readers – is uniquely ill-suited to the restless attention with which we consume a variety of online texts." Colette Bryce • Poetry London

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"'I’ll be there next to you in an instant, in a second that inaugurates time.'" John Felstiner on Paul Celan's letters • Mantis (pdf)

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"A country’s literature, in whatever language, whether indigenous or hybrid or adopted, is her people’s memory: there lies literature’s chief value, for a people is only as strong as their memory." Gémino H. Abad • Poet's Picturebook

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"Walcott would sit us in an empty theatre for lessons on poetry as a spoken, performative art. His was an intimidating, almost adversarial style of teaching. On-the-spot class writing assignments were issued as imperatives and challenges." Eva Salzman • Poetry London

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"Ideally poetry reveals the face of justice through syntax, balance, image." Fanny Howe • Poetry

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"[Gustaf] Sobin’s was a lifelong investigation of, investment in, and vigilance toward the tiniest, most peripheral of objects and abstractions." Andrew Joron and Andrew Zawacki • Jacket

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"Those who use prestigious forms have always reinforced their cultural dominance by appropriating high art--especially poetry." Andrew McCulloch on Tony Harrison • TLS

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"Now I know what silence is in French and English." Gillian Allnut • Poetry Review

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