"Nicholas Moore, the son of a famous man – his father was philosopher G.E. Moore – had been a famous poet, once, briefly." Martin Sorrell • Fortnightly Review

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"The fact is that while I find it hard to imagine translating Dante’s famous Lasciate ogni speranza… any other way than “Abandon all hope” (curiously introducing this rather heavy verb where in the Italian we have a simple lasciare, to leave) here I just can’t imagine any reason for not reorganizing La speranza non abbandona mai l’uomo, into Man never never loses hope." Tim Parks • NYRB

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"For all the archness and cleverness, however, such images betray a serious and incessantly inquiring mind that seeks out epiphanies almost anywhere, analysing feelings, objects and the behaviour of others to the point of paralysing uncertainty." Ben Wilkinson on Emily Berry • Guardian

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"It says more about us than it does about Katherine Philips that, confronted with this kind of argument, we instinctively assume it must really be about sexual desire." Austen Saunders • Spectator

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"[Robert] Kelly names every thing one and many. The lover and beloved become the names of each thing: in, out, path, rose, and flesh." Jordan Reynolds • Rain Taxi

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"When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it’s a lineated or prose poem, but I don’t think I can explain how. It’s like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants." Matthea Harvey in conversation with Louis Bourgeois • Rain Taxi

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"In the late 1940s, he came up to Dublin to take a much coveted job in the civil service, and the books he bought there–just a couple every year–are still on the shelf. They are all paperbacks. Wilde’s Salome, Shaw’s Man and Superman were bought in 1949. These were followed by Dante, The Greeks by Kitto, Spinoza by Stuart Hampshire, Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist, all the way to Sophocles and Rousseau in 1953." Anne Enright on censorship • LRB

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"Eliot did not wait to be instructed by one of his sages, TE Hulme, that people are divisible into two groups: those who believe in original sin and those (with their master, Rousseau) who don’t. Every other difference arises from that one. Eliot’s most formidable essays during these years, those on Dante (1929), Baudelaire (1930) and Pascal (1931), explicate the terms of his new sense of life, notably his belief in original sin and the irresistible force of his conversion." Denis Donoghue • Irish Times

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"Wherever they were found, what these artworks express is the nature of relationships. The relationship of women to their own bodies, and bodily changes, especially around childbearing. The human relationship to wild animals, at a time when all animals were wild, and we depended on them. Also, there is the relationship to spirit animals and otherworlds. (The grave goods of one boy suggest he was a shaman.) We are still preoccupied with our own bodies; it is the Paleolithic link to animals we miss." Kathleen Jamie • Guardian

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"One of the theoretical planks of Acmeism involved a certain trans-historical literary synchronicity: all poets from all ages were spiritually alive and available to the Acmeist, in a sort of Bergsonian omnipresent time-continuum. As Mandelstam put it, "We don't want Ovid translations--we want the living, breathing Ovid!" Henry Gould on Osip Mandelstam • Critical Flame

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"But the astonishing energy and the unprecedented self-examination of the letters create a problem: as in the case of Hayley’s Cowper, only to an extreme degree, the biographer’s dilemma is that the best Life of John Keats remains the letters of John Keats." Jonathan Bate • TLS

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"This, I think, is the best catchall description of Carson. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, she is always a “visiting [whatever].”" Sam Anderson on Anne Carson • NYT

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Why is the retrospective volume of Poems the best place to start if you want to like [John] Milton? The answer is that it shows not Milton turgidulus, or Milton the sage and serious defender of republican learning, or Milton the achieved polymath, or Milton the heretical crank. It shows Milton in the making. Colin Burrow • LRB

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"Madness, Rack, and Honey reads like a steroid-boosted version of a commonplace book, those thinking persons’ scrapbooks that became popular in early modern Europe and contained quotations from the classics, scraps of conversation, poem fragments, recipes, proverbs and lists of every sort." David Kirby • NYT

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"A Collected Poems of Edward Dorn, the American poet who died in 1999, is a necessary and overdue publication, and, whatever the circumstances, the fact that it was not published in U.S.A. suggests that there is something very wrong with the local culture over there, a fact of which Ed Dorn was very much aware." Peter Riley Fortnightly Review

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"A book requires literacy; a drawing demands only eyes. 'Gary, my sponge, toddles beneath a happenstance of ugh' is composed of semantic units that cannot help but signify, so that you have meaning and meanings and meaninglessness and texture and sound, whereas [insert squiggle here] simply is. And so on." Nico Alvarado on Michael Gizzi • Jacket2

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"In poetry, language moves the way it does in dreams, where everything is superimposed very rapidly on everything else." Medbh McGuckian • Irish Examiner

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"[I am] slightly disheartened by what seems elsewhere like a wilful uninterest in the history of alternative British poetries by some writers. . . . Or they are looking to American work only as if none the things we talked about earlier mattered. Less sympathetically, it's easier to isolate one's genius than to have to admit that the thing has been done before and done better." Rupert Loydell and Robert Sheppard in conversation • Stride

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"There's an entrancement with language and rhythm, a generally elevated tone, and a concern with national identity in "Words" which carry echoes from Welsh poetry, past and future." Carol Rumens on Edward Thomas • Guardian

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"[I]t does appear that there is a kind of gap between what metricians will agree to call rhyme and what readers can recognize as rhyme. For most readers, these lines by Prynne make a rhyme, and no amount of Kenner, Samoilov or Zhirmunsky will persuade them otherwise. In dominant theories of rhyme, we are in the presence, in fact, of a metricization of rhyme." Simnon Jarvis • Thinking Verse (pdf)

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"Temporal freedom gives Welsch the scope to get to grips with the past in the same way as the present and enables him to hone in on the continuities that give his Waterloo its distinct identity, making this pamphlet about more than just the thoughts of a young man in a small town, trying to find out who he is and contemplating which members of his family might inherit 'the more valuable porcelain owls.'" Anthony Adler • Sidekick

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"The world of [Robin] Robertson's poems tends to be one governed by unfathomable and harsh impulses and imperatives, whether they're dealing with mythic characters or those from our own reality." Adam Newey • Guardian

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"[I]t comes as no surprise that one of the echoing voices behind these journal entries should be that of Charles Dickens. The administrative world of the Circumlocution Office where the files 'in multiple copies, of official forms, waiting to be processed. . .impede the corridors and every square inch of space. . .[a]nd everyone smiles' can only be escaped by the 'minor copyist at the Ministry of Documents' who gets out of the building at mid-day[.]" Ian Brinton on Martin Anderson • Eyewear

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"To what extent is Proust — or Beckett, or whomever a Carson book recruits — an interchangeable signifier of hefty, high culture? Discussing the typical Paul Auster novel, James Woods elegantly describes the maneuver: “A visiting text — Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Hawthorne, Poe, Beckett — is elegantly slid into the host book.” Whom, I’ve started to wonder, will Carson host next? What is there to quote?" Jason Guriel on Anne Carson • Poetry

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"He was asked why he thought heretics were persecuted. His answer – that heretics are the only ones who really care about religion – gives us an insight into his humour, the breadth of his sympathy, and the integrity of his poetry." Patrick McGuinness on Ed Dorn • Guardian

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"I have to admit I felt stricken by them. I could see at once that they were amazingly good, but also that they were good in ways that were going to have a calamitous effect on all my assumptions about poetry." James Lasdun on Michael Hofmann • Poetry

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"All eight of these writers know that material struggle is what is demanded instead--if poetry can reflect this need through a real and sometimes violent force of love, then perhaps there is something to be done with it." Samuel Solomon • Lana Turner

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"To her thousands of fans, [Patricia] Lockwood is famous for being the funniest person on Twitter. But she's a poet first, with a Popeye fetish and a love of lilt." Michael Robbins • Chicago Tribune

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"Let the genres blur if they will. Let the genres redefine themselves." Carole Maso • Barcelona Review

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