"Kingsley Amis had an explicit, if ironic, sense of the footsteps in which he and Philip Larkin were following: “Well with you as the Auden and me as the Isherwood de nos jours, ‘our society’ is not doing so bad”, he told his friend in October 1957." Neil Powell • TLS

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"His poetry had made him the peer in world literature of Whitman and Wordsworth, but the 4,526-page Zibaldone places [Leopardi] in a different realm entirely." Brian Patrick Eha • American Reader

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"Unfortunately, the finished product is more a novelty than a novel, a clever but not deeply imagined poem of the kind you’d hear on public radio on the weekends, meaning it might make you snicker or say “huh” but it won’t make you think for more than a minute about anything that matters lest you be too distracted to catch the next unlikely rhyme." John Cotter on a verse novel • Open Letters Monthly

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"His full name was Thomas M. Disch, and he was a writer and a poet. His friend was Marilyn Hacker, and she was also a poet (eventually, she became a famous one). I had doubts about going coast-to-coast with a couple of poets, especially because they said they would be writing poetry collaboratively along the way. That didn’t exactly sound like a fun road trip." Charles Platt • Curbside Classic

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"R.S. Thomas was never a great original: in later life he learned from, among others, Ted Hughes and William Carlos Williams, adapting their rhythms and notions to his own, often startling purposes." Rory Waterman • TLS

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"There’s so much poetry of understatement around (I might even be guilty of it myself) that a bit of blood and guts could be refreshing." Barry Schwabsky on Louise Glück • Hyperallergic

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"This is, I believe, part of the poem's lyric code. It is the grammatical, but also the synergetic manifestation of our hidden, constantly shifting "errant selves" on which the modern lyric structures itself." Gabriel Levin • The Bow-Wow Shop

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"Politics dates you—​and usually not in an interesting, archaeological way." Cynthia Haven on Adrienne Rich • VQR

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"I then wrote Professor Mendelson into an Isabel Dalhousie novel, creating a scene in which he comes to Edinburgh to deliver a public lecture on the sense of neurotic guilt in Auden’s verse. A year later, we translated fiction into reality by bringing Mendelson to Edinburgh to deliver before a real audience the lecture that he had previously given to a group of fictional characters. Such is the interest in Auden that almost 400 people came to hear him speak." Alexander McCall Smith on Auden • New Statesman

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"Bringhurst, a Canadian poet and translator, has spent the better part of a career studying the classical Haida literary tradition, and a decade translating thousands of lines of Haida myth-poetry into English." Matthew Spellberg • LA Review of Books

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"Some of [Morrissey's] verse enthusiasms we might have guessed at – Betjeman and Stevie Smith for instance – but others are a revelation; Auden, Robert Herrick, Housman. He quotes a stanza of the latter – "How often have I washed and dressed/and what's to show for all my pain/let me lie abed and rest/ten thousand times I've done my best/and all's to do again" – that could come straight from the lyric sheet of the first Smiths album." Stuart Maconie • Observer

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“Does he understand these things aren’t given out to just anybody? You can’t simply shit out a few reams of verse like Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror and expect to hang with the big boys like Yasunari Kawabata and Octavio Paz. You just can’t.”The Onion

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"I am not interested in a poet's mind; it's not what draws me to poetry." Arthur Krystal • The Chronicle of Higher Education

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"Bunting's demon of negativity produces an entertaining thread in this biography - his talent for hatred. He hated southerners ('utterly impossibly & hateful'), Germans ('I've loathed the Germans for so many years'), Spaniards ('a cruel people'), American Midwesterners ('a disgusting lot') and journalists ('turd-bakers'; 'not capable of any thought of any sort at all'). He hated being a journalist ('wretched newspaper job ... tiresome drudgery'), teaching modern American poetry ('somebody called O'Hara ... The prospect appals me') and being given money by the Arts Council ('desk and pen vermin'). He also hated most other poets:" Matthew Sperling • Literary Review

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"On the contrary: to have reached middle age at all implies courage and doggedness." Carol Rumens • Guardian

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"Hollander, who moved skillfully among verse techniques, was dismissive of the battle lines drawn in contemporary poetry between “formal” and “free.”" David Yezzi • New Criterion

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"[T]he disturbances and misdirections of everyday life frustrate artistic satisfaction even as they provide the substance of Bergin’s poetry." Tess Somervell on Tara Bergin • Tower Poetry

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"[I]n promoting the symbol (pavement) and its content (loss of adventure) to the same plane, Goyette fails to tell us a story about either: it is a case of x + x = x." Chad Campbell on Sue Goyette • Maisonneuve

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"Still, when it comes to contemporary poetry, I'll take ambition that crashes occasionally over pious bird-watching and recycled experimentation any day..." Michael Robbins on Nick Laird and August Kleinzahler • Chicago Tribune

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"Alice and I have been friends since 1969, when her collection of stories “Dance of the Happy Shades” and my collection of poems “The Circle Game” were both published, and I slept on her floor during a visit to Victoria. A lot of Canadians began with short stories then, because it was so hard to get novels published in Canada in the sixties. We both got our start through Robert Weaver’s CBC radio show, “Anthology.” Canadians will be thrilled, Alice will be bowled over, and we will all have a party once she has made her way out of the coat closet, where she has probably gone to hide." Margaret Atwood • New Yorker

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"The extent to which Arendt values the “personal” is particularly vivid in her decision to make the centerpiece of her essay Brecht’s poem “Der Herr der Fische,” which she claims is “among his very best works” and “the only strictly personal poem he ever wrote”" Jennifer Ashton • Nonsite

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"If one is going to take liberties with the original, as both of the translations under review do, there should be a payoff." Robert Pogue Harrison on new Dantes • NYRB

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"The first full English version of the Zibaldone is a major event in the history of ideas. With its publication, Leopardi will be ranked among the supreme interrogators of the modern condition." John Gray • New Statesman

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"It’s just a very lucky thing, finding editors whose taste coincides with what you’re doing." Ellen Bryant Voigt • Granta

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"[T]he poems in Metaphysical Dog don’t supplant the earlier work but grow organically from it. Bidart, as maker, is fueled by dissatisfaction, which parallels the romantic discontents he charts." Meg Schoerke on new books by Rich, Stern, Bidart and Daniel Hoffman • Hudson Review

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"[Harriet Monroe] invented a box, you could say — and promptly set to work thinking outside it. Her magazine was, therefore, like she was: unpredictable, difficult, and infuriating." Don Share • Poetry

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"These three poets deserve more space and scrutiny." Eavan Boland • Irish Times (1966)

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"In an attempt to sail between the Scylla of 'the Irish mode' originally sponsored by Thomas MacDonagh and maintained as a literary category by later writers such as Robert Farren in his book The Course of Irish Verse (1949), and the Charybdis of a more standardized, New Lines-ish, iambic English, I devised a conceit in which Irish experience was to equal vowels and the English literary tradition was to equal consonants, and my poems were to be 'vocables adequate to my whole experience'. It was, admittedly, a fairly Euphuistic conception, but even so, it did signal a genuine stylistic problem, one which has been endemic to Irish writing and whose solution always represents a definite moment in a poet's development." Seamus Heaney on Padraic Fallon • PN Review (1990)

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"Like a latter-day Blake or Stanley Spencer, Symmons Roberts places his revelatory imagery within a defiantly ordinary, contemporary setting, which both hints at its transcendant strangeness and brings that strangeness down to earth." Adam Newey • Guardian

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"[Glyn] Maxwell’s poems are constantly sizing up and shaking down their subjects, restlessly stylised even at their most affecting." John McAuliffe on Forward Prize shortlist • Irish Times

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"He originally submitted this poem in response to the L.A. Times op-ed page's unusual call for poems. They passed. Their loss." Sarah Fenske on Daniel Bosch • LA Weekly

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