"[Stephen] Mitchell again and again in his introduction feels compelled to apologize for the violence and mayhem of the Iliad’s story line, as though his readers cannot handle it. But his readers? Citizens of the most belligerent nation on the globe, from waterboarding to drone flights from one presidential order to another, who can participate in violence twenty-four-seven on their television screens, and if not from reality shown on screen then in the extraordinarily prurient violence of filmed fictions." Charles Rowan Beye • Arion

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"The poet Yvor Winters defended Baudelaire against accusations of decadence by comparing him with Shakespeare. Both he and Shakespeare had the ability to portray the unlovely manifestations of man’s animus." David Yezzi • New Criterion

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"Symmons Roberts has a gift for seeing the spirit in things even (as can happen in life) at unlikely moments and in bad weather (cars are unexpectedly present in his work – there is even something pushing an epiphany in a karaoke bar)." Kate Kellaway • Observer

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"Dorn’s time in England marks a period of great intellectual ferment, in close relation to Prynne and drawing on the example of 

Charles 

Olson, with 

the 

common 

aim 

of 

inventing a 

language 

of poetry which could extend from the smallest desires of daily life to the largest economic, geological and 

 cosmological perspectives. Whereas Olson

 sometimes tends towards grandiosity in The Maximus Poems, and Prynne towards work of an icy remoteness, Dorn plies such various discourses much more freely, funnily, and charismatically." Matthew Sperling • London Magazine

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"[B]oth Pound and Olson drive toward a choice that would proclaim, make women coequal with men. Then they turn the car. They just veer right off and you can see it happening." Rachel Blau DuPlessis in conversation with Andy Fitch • The Conversant

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"He went from wunderkind to alte meister. How many can say that?" Evan Jones on Daryl Hine • The Malahat Review

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"By expanding Dante’s concentrated original, [Clive] James often dulls its effect." Joseph Luzzi • NYT

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“Red Doc> might fail as a novel — did it want to succeed as a novel? — but it succeeds as linguistic confrontation." Daisy Fried • NYT

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"So-called 'avant-garde' poetry is never an innocent dalliance, free of the marketplace. It’s a bet against the present, a bet on future appreciation." Jason Guriel • Parnassus

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"It remains, nonetheless, a fundamental ambition of mine that my poetry will exercise some influence of a political character over living individuals, now, in this world, and that it will contribute meaningfully to creating, sustaining and enriching a vibrant communist public culture, in which it is a loyal and constant ambition to break down the forms of social paralysis and injustice, as well as of self-interested mastery and of exploitation, which under capital adulterate all of our relations with each other, even the most intimate [...] But I suspect that what will continue to happen, for a long time at least, is that lots of anxious and conservatively rather than radically narcissistic poets will go on writing verse which, with more or less justification, is meant to encapsulate and preserve in the aspic of sentimental memory and sensation the trivia of working-week-life and their surface profundities, poems that may only distantly touch upon the complexity of social relations, and then with a defensive, pretty archness." Keston Sutherland • The White Review

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"Ireland has no equivalent of the Pléiade, the career crowning glory laid down on bible-paper bound between leather-tooled covers, yet here within the burnished gold covers of the New Collected Poems, heightened in their intensity by the claret coloured hues of the end papers and lettering, we have a volume that will glow on our shelves for generations to come." Clíona Ní Ríordáin on John Montague • Southword

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"Ad hominem attacks miss the point, but a passion for the well-being of poetry requires discrimination between the good enough and the best. Poets are, of course, notoriously short on epidermis." Gwyneth Lewis and others on Carmine Starnino and others • Poetry

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"A while back, not too long ago, we found ourselves in the era of French criticism and the “unreading” of literature. And a lot of bad poetry." Stephen Dunn • Georgia Review

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"There are few glimpses of the cold, wounded observations that marked the poet’s first books, more than a quarter-century ago — the canny social malaise, the slightly bitter tone, the whiff of misery, the suspicion of what the world offers, all reminiscent of Larkin without being slavishly indebted. These have been replaced by knee-jerk politics, third-rate knockoffs of folk tales and a vision of England where Sunday cricketers still gather on village greens and bell-ringers yank the ropes in the local church. Duffy is pure Labour in her politics (old Labour, that is), but cheerfully Tory in her postcard views." William Logan on Carol Ann Duffy • NYT

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"Carson offers an exquisite contribution to the continuing evolution of this liminal text" Lucy Hinnie on Ciaran Carson's Rimbaud • Tower Poetry

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"This is a commanding book, and its first and last poems especially stand out: “Torment,” a biting narrative about narcissistic students, and “Ask The Poetess,” a hilarious parody of advice columns and the poetry business." Matthew Brennan on Daisy Fried and others • NYT

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"Don’t play the victim card, now the staple of much of what passes for poetry. Where, after all, are those virtuous beings, those sages who stand outside the capitalist system, refusing to accept any of its goodies? Are you and I really not complicit?" Marjorie Perloff • Poetry

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" if translation hadn’t already existed as a practice, post-structuralists would’ve had to have invented it." Joshua Weiner • B O D Y

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"Visually the work is off-putting, surreal, an art object: straggling red and black blocks of text, ostentatiously hand-written in all-caps with huge gaps and irregular punctuation. This is a work intended be considered as is, not simply as a guideline to performance." Jennifer Thorp on Anne Carson • Manchester Review

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"In the future, [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]" Jeanine Webb • Armed Cell (scroll down)

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"I see a huge shift in my generation towards the poem as opening onto other genres, multimedia, the incorporation of the internet, the insertion of the visual." Adam Fitzgerald in conversation with Barbara Claire Freeman • OmniVerse

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"Oscar Wilde agreed with Matthew Arnold that in the 19th century, criticism created the 'intellectual atmosphere of the age.' In our 21st century, even though the reach of single review websites cannot match that of the mass media, working together (rather than against one other), the two can enrich, not deplete, our shared cultural discourse and thus the intellectual atmosphere of our age." Linda Hutcheon • Irish Times

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"All sorts of writers are making things under the sign of poetry that don’t necessarily resemble poetry and definitely don’t resemble each other. Ten years ago much of this writing wouldn’t have been signified under the name of poetry. It’s reckless and outlandish and often malformed. And exciting and invigorating. And because of this recklessness none of us have any idea what will happen ten years from now." Steven Zultanski in conversation with Kristen Gallagher • Jacket2

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"When will we be able to think of Palestinian poetry beyond war, cold or hot? Even these words I write seem, paradoxically, to cement the notion that Palestinian literature is only about politics, catastrophe, and survival. When will we embrace Palestinian literature for its vision of exile, not as nostalgia but (as Judith Butler says of Darwish’s poetry) as a signpost for the future, for the strangers we are, the stranger within and without us?" Dara Barnat, Fady Joudah, Tala Abu Rahmeh and Marcela Sulak • LARB

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"I’m interested in older poetic forms in an almost Benjaminian sense, as artifacts that have outlived their world, which when resurrected Frankenstein-style bring certain utopian resonances as well as modes of critique to bear." Joshua Corey in conversation with Stephen Ross • Wave Composition

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"We developed these modules in the spirit of play, which we hope carries over to their use. The constraints are meant to focus but should not stifle experimentation and openness." Compass Poetry Modules • High Chair

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"Otherwise strong poems feel let down by a slight obviousness of description, thus ‘no scarecrow looks like another/ some are tall, some small’ (‘The Village of Scarecrows’), ‘I’d rent a room in hilly Alfama’ (‘The Blue Hammock’); at other times however, and sometimes within the same poem, this clear-sighted aspect and simple description takes on a unique and uncomplicated truthfulness: ‘The seagulls are huge there, and musical’ (‘The Blue Hammock’), and ‘the silver birch with my initials stretched/ upward to its far-off father, the moon’ (‘The Blue Hammock’)." Laura Webb on Matthew Sweeney and George Szirtes • Manchester Review "Horse Music is not a book of essays in verse—factual reportage or encyclopaedic articles reshaped into scanning stanzas." Patrick Cotter on Sweeney • Southword

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"Wallace Stevens was not a trained philosopher, but his desires were philosophic. Mostly, he hoped-against-hope that Idealism would turn out to be true—that consciousness would be found to account for the whole of one’s experience." Denis Donoghue • Hudson Review

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"How to talk about death without resorting to cliché? The formal territory of the social or public seems so inherently inadequate or badly-equipped, in the language of the commonly understood and inherently unspecific, for the subject it must propose to tackle." On Denise Riley and other poets • The Literateur

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"He intersperses his vivid sketches of the lives of the poets with travelogues of his journeys through the Italian countryside to their ostensible homes and birthplaces; extensive cultural trivia; a number of elegant ad hoc translations of Latin poetry; and wild if memorable palaces of historical fantasization built on the homelier facts of his subjects’ lives. And in doing so, he accomplishes something that every classicist aspires to do, but few actually achieve: he brings the literature of the classical world to life for the curious but otherwise uninformed reader." Spencer Lenfield on Gilbert Highet • Open Letters Monthly

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