"My poetry doesn’t entertain the illusion of an approximation to music." Yusef Komunyakaa • PN Review

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"The best readings of these puzzling poems remain those that keep themselves open to ambiguity and multiplicity." Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare's sonnets • Financial Times

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"Somehow, the triplet stanzas also have the rhythm of the waves in them." Carol Rumens on David Wheatley • Guardian

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"The Bitter Withy is focused precisely on linking the material to the metaphysical, the quotidian to the eternal." Tim Erickson on Donald Revell • Chicago Review

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"Waiting is the perfect subject-matter for such stretched-out forms, and indeed the collection’s most perfect line is about this substance of empty time: ‘in waiting you are the numbers’." Annie McDermott on Jim Goar • Literateur

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"At the beginning of language there were two distinct urges: one to register presence, the other to register desire. The first—a cry—became poetry; the second—a question—became the story." George Szirtes • Almost Island

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"Commas slow down reading artificially, just like the line break or medial caesura. Poetry in which commas are used as a graphic or visual device slows down language in order to make it appear inexpressible, ineffable—the typical domain of poetry. But this is not really the case; it’s a hallucination that most poetry creates quite deliberately." Tan Lin in conversation with Katherine Elaine Sanders • Bombsite

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"In the wake of the various modernist disruptions of poetic decorum, however, stillness and restraint became associated with the kind of poems we call traditional, while energy and excess were claimed by the poems we call experimental. 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' embodied this predicament for us almost a hundred years ago, and it shows few signs of abating." James Longenbach • Poetry Daily

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"This is a lovely book; full poems that really stand up, and to which you will keep returning." Ian Pople on Modern Canadian Poets • Manchester Review

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"It was at the crossroads of their two poetic traditions, French and English, that Beach and Monnier undertook one of their most influential joint works, the first French translation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which appeared in Monnier’s Le Navire d’Argent in 1925 [...] Their translation reminds us that “Prufrock” is a poem that is deeply at home in French, inspired by the decaying urban scenes of Baudelaire and the Symbolist verse of Jules Laforgue." Keri Walsh on Shakespeare & Co. • Brick

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"But that’s a large part of the pleasure here; the book’s resistance to uniformity, at the same time that it appears to bless uniformity as an aesthetic ideal." Maureen Thorson on Tan Lin • The Montserrat Review

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"In the wake of the various modernist disruptions of poetic decorum, however, stillness and restraint became associated with the kind of poems we call traditional, while energy and excess were claimed by the poems we call experimental. 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' embodied this predicament for us almost a hundred years ago, and it shows few signs of abating." James Longenbach • Poetry Daily

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"The discipline of creative writing is believed to be toxic by some, including the new Professor of Poetry at Oxford." Michael Schmidt • PN Review

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"The cult of personality surrounding Pessoa is captivating, because he was relatively unknown while alive, and revealed himself as the most multifarious of writers after his sudden death." Syma Tariq • Guardian

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"One of my first thoughts about it all was how totally misleading and dishonest the word “spill” was." Nick Flynn, Dorianne Laux and others • Gulf Coast

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"These two new books—Recollected Poems: 1951–2004 and &: a Serial Poem—brush the dust off Hine’s career, and a remarkable, bronze-shining corpus begins to emerge." Alexander Lewis on Daryl Hine • Critical Flame

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"Yet how rare it is when a poet immersed in other voices—there are whispers of Yeats, of Heaney, even of Hardy—speaks with a voice resolutely her own." William Logan on Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and others • New Criterion

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"The city, like the country, is to the people whose histories are rooted there the site of triumph, trauma, variants of nostalgia – the elementary pharmakon, both cure and poison." Karen Solie on Frank O'Hara • Magma

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"Reviewing was also a way of exploring Scotland, which sometimes bore very direct fruit, as in the case of Tom Leonard's Places of the Mind (1993), a biography of the alcoholic Scottish poet James Thomson, "B. V.", who became the subject of the second of Imlah's "Afterlives of the Poets."" Alan Hollinghurst on poet-editor Mick Imlah • Guardian

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"One feels caught between two small boys arguing is too, is not." Belle Randall on reviewing and Robert Hass • Poetry

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"Maybe it’s the remainder tables that secretly move the culture forward. Up-and-coming writers, strapped for cash and dismissive of the books that are being published and getting noticed, gravitate toward these steam tables of overlooked lit, these shallow arks of the minor." Ed Park • Poetry

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"Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler are both fine argument-starters, modernist products of their time. One senses that besides death, these books are combatting another formidable antagonist: the 21st century." Daisy Fried • New York Times

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"Many traditional stories tell us that obedient wives and daughters are rewarded, and disobedient ones punished. That’s the symmetry I’m interested in disrupting." Barbara Jane Reyes in conversation with Rigoberto González • Critical Mass

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"his letting a boughful of snow dump over his head and not worsen but improve his dreadful day" Louis B Jones on Frost • Threepenny Review

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"But what matters more to Stevenson than fame--she advises poets, in 'Making Poetry', to 'evade . . . the siren hiss of publish, success, publish / success, success, success'-–is to 'play' in verse the music that, since going deaf in her thirties, she can no longer hear in reality." Andrew McCulloch on Anne Stevenson • TLS

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"Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study." Robert Pippen • New York Times

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"While this selection may not boast a major sequence like Love and a Life or Sonnets from Scotland, the book still crackles with all the curiosity, wit and playful intelligence that made Morgan such a celebrated and loved poet." Paul Batchelor on Edwin Morgan's final collection • Guardian

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