"I love Dickinson on the page, but despite the novelty of the visual and indeterminate Dickinson, we shouldn’t lose track of the sound of her words, when the poems are reassembled and recited in the common meter." Ange Mlinko The Nation

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"A poem must come into being from a position of understanding that nothing can ever be fully realised in language: it can only exist as a fetch of lived experience that asks more questions than it answers." Stephen Connolly • The Lifeboat

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"The most successful sequence in the Aeneid, the self-immolation of Dido, is, paradoxically enough, a source of the epic’s weakness." Amit Majmudar • Kenyon Review

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"Kleinzahler's title alone licenses us to brand him "oneiric", but this is dreamwork of a tough and streetwise hue." David Wheatley • Guardian

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"Why does rhyme, in languages that use rhyme, so often come (at least for a while) to stand for poetry as such?" Stephen Burt • American Poetry Review

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"Daily Rituals is a thoroughly researched, minutely annotated and delightful little book, full of the quirks and oddities of the human comedy. How striking that both Milton and Richard Strauss, quite independently, compared their creativity to a cow being milked. Its main lesson can be summed up simply enough: get up, have a cup of coffee, sit at your desk and begin." Christopher Hart • Literary Review

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"[T]heir poems think hard about what those luxury apartments stand for." David Gorin • Boston Review

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"André Breton in Prague!" Marci Shore • TLS

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"[Marianne] Moore’s view of poetry was that it ought to be clear and simple, but she fooled herself that her love of the precise phrase made her not-difficult." Mary Jo Salter • The Atlantic

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"Compared with the cold Pound, intent on the shapes and silhouettes of his perceptions, chiseling a scene into the etching of a poem, [Amy] Lowell revels in the electric atmosphere of love, in the sparks, no less, that occur in the marriage of lovers." Carl Rollyson • Humanities

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"At the heart of the conflict is a small, semi-lawless zone, known in Private Eye as "Poetryland"." Jeremy Noel-Tod • Enitharmon

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"Within a few short months, the Great War began, a cataclysm that was to engulf all four young poets and bring their optimism, hopes and aspirations to naught." Brian Maye • Irish Times

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"Borges had been reading English translations of the epics throughout his life, but when he was fifty-nine, he set out to teach himself Anglo-Saxon, a process he called “the pure contemplation of a language at its dawn.” The epics provided him with a kind of literary ideal: concrete, precise, and suffused with the glow of the sword as a magical object. His reader’s eye was keen, and interestingly unpredictable. He admires the “Finnsburh Fragment” over Beowulf, for instance, though it consists of a mere sixty lines, preserved from what surely was a much longer poem, and composed, perhaps, as early as the late seventh century." Michael Greenberg • NYRB

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"I wouldn't say there's metrical fidelity to the original meters, which isn't reproducible, but there's a new rhythmic design to take in the English sounds and the shifting content." Anne Carson • Asymptote

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"On the heels of the colossal success of Eunoia, a prose poem whose five chapters each use only one vowel — winner of the 2002 Griffin Prize, and by some counts, the bestselling book of Canadian poetry, ever — Bök went casting around for a new project. He came across news of a scientist at the Pacific North West National Laboratory, Pak Chung Wong, who translated the lyrics to “It’s a Small World After All” into the four-letter nucleotide alphabet of DNA, which he then inserted into deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium that can withstand extreme heat and cold, acid, otherwise-deadly radiation, even the vacuum of space." Michael Lista on Christian Bök • National Post

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"Peter [Fallon]’s energising omnipresence lit a neon torch for a generation that had had its fill of staidness and – appetite freshly whetted by Lunch Poems and Howl, by the Beat school and the Liverpool Poets – was hungry for an Irish poetry with more pizzazz, more jazz, one likelier to appeal to the metalhead music fan than the egghead academic. He expanded Ireland’s poetry constituency, making the art accessible to an audience that had felt excluded from this “elitist” pursuit." Dennis O'Driscoll • Irish Times

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"Is Women's Poetry a masterpiece? It surely locates Fried among the masterful American poets of her generation. I'd point readers to 'Torment', of course, but also 'Thrash', 'His Failed Band, 1973', 'L'Allegro: Driving Home', maybe the Kissinger, definitely the title poem, which, if Camille Paglia ever does another edition of Break, Blow, Burn, you can imagine her including." Jason Guriel • PN Review

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"'The Cranium' is a poem where “the wetware of vessels” is juxtaposed with the delicacy of all the strands of memory and of self contained therein. While such poems have a coolness about them, there are many others by this England-based poet from Lisgoold, Co Cork, where he offers affectionate and moving dedications to fellow Cork poets, living and dead, not least in "The Hip-Flask", a lovely tribute to the late Gregory O’Donoghue." Liam Heylin • Irish Examiner

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"One might enumerate all the ways in which Koch must have felt like an outsider — a Jew in the Ivy League, a Midwesterner in New York, a heterosexual in a homosexual coterie (the New York School) — but being a comic poet with a metaphysical bent in the postwar/Cold War/New Criticism era might have cut the deepest: not that he himself was on the outside, but that his poems were on the outside." Ange Mlinko • Poetry

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"Ritsos eventually ended up imprisoned again in 1967, and those who either recited or sang his verses faced arrest as well. As before, the literary world took note and made an issue of his imprisonment, which ended when the leaders of the coup under Papadopoulos were detained. " Amy Henry on Yannis Ritsos • Pacific Rim Review of Books

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"There is only one sphere in which metaphor is able to function, where spirit can be said in terms of matter, and that is poetry itself. That is why poetry, for Frost as for Emerson, is the essence of language, without which it is impossible to think at all." Adam Kirsch • Harvard Magazine

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"Benighted, presumably, by the world-wide web, the stay-at-home generation studied by Talking Vrouz develops not poetic vision but ‘stone-dead eyes’. Everything reflected and resounding back from the internet—a ‘giant soupspoon’ tool of gratification—is ‘the mouth which full of loneliness is mute’, Rouzeau’s word order invoking here the destructive linguistic properties of the net." Ruth Ling on Valerie Rouzeau • The Wolf

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"And each time there seem new corridors to the euphoria. I am nowhere close to being a poet with the academic skill of Ashbery, but I think it’s the poem that has influenced my own billboard poems the most, it’s certainly the reason that I habitually write in the second person in my own work." Robert Montgomery • Magma

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"Money, history, poetry. They’re how we know where we come from, where we are, and what the places are that make us." Ali Smith • Brick

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"At least once a decade, the conversation about poetry gets bloody enough to inspire rubbernecking." Jonathan Farmer • Slate

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"There's a bunch of reasons why a writer might want the words at the ends of the lines in their poems to rhyme. Here are some of them: rhyme gives their poems a neat structure and people like neatness; rhyme is a way of asserting an affiliation to a particular idea of tradition – when people talk about 'traditional' poetry what they often mean is poetry that uses rhyme; rhyme is a way of asserting an affiliation not so much to some general abstract unspecific idea of tradition but to a particular approach that is used by particular poets and, in doing so, you are admitting an influence or possibly even flagging up an allegiance." Matthew Welton • The Quietus

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"Kinsella alights on the same phrase that Heaney chose for his 9/11 elegy (‘Anything Can Happen’) but his is a much more discursive style; the language is not a bog to draw him in, but an interesting surface over subterranean, unvisited darknesses. The taste for mythological long distance and archetypal sources has not gone away’" John Greening • London Grip

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"Perhaps straight reviewers can be forgiven for being befuddled by all the labels the members of the LGBTTIQQ community have used to describe themselves over the course of the past 45 years—for one thing, we keep adding letters to our ever-more precise, ever more encompassing acronym. It suggests to me that identity, whether of the individual or the group, is an ill-fitting garment we keep adjusting to make our lumps and bulges—our uniqueness—more becoming or at least more apparent." John Barton • CWILA

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"Borders, whether real or virtual, are old-fashioned and restrictive. Can we not, like a good poem, move and stay still at the same time?" Anne Enright • Irish Times

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"[I]t’s [Carl] Phillips’ inability that makes his poems take root: his inability to ever pull free of the counterweight hanging on to his ideas, a kind of gravity that measures significance by the very strength of its resistance to anything he hopes to mean." Jonathan Farmer • Slate

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"The relationship between Byron the poet and Byron the politician, and the question of which should be seen as dominant, has long been troublesome." Emily A Bernhard Jackson • TLS

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