"Frank Kermode, a masterly British critic, put it neatly: “So I educate myself in public, which I take to be the reviewer’s privilege”." Peter Rose The Conversation

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"Our modern prizes are rooted in the profane ground of sponsorship and publicity. And they have proved an effective advertisement for poetry. Witness the two-thousand-plus audiences for the Eliot readings at the Royal Festival Hall every January. The competitions themselves, however, need to be run on principles of good practice, with clear rules concerning declarations of interest, and transparency about the process. It’s not right to ask people to make careerchanging judgements without proper guidance. And how to pick the judges – for integrity or for celebrity? Those Athenian arbiters sitting in the front row preferring the Sophocles to the Euripides were chosen by lot." Maurice Riordan Poetry Review

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"PN Review began before the Creative Writing industry boomed. The editor himself spent twenty-odd years developing writing programmes: his hands are not clean in this respect. But he remembers a time before, when submissions sorted themselves into three piles, rejections (a big pile), acceptances (small) and possibles (tiny). In the time after, the third pile is highest, the plausibles as we call them." Michael Schmidt PN Review

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"Some people, young and old, just won’t read New Zealand poetry." Nina Powles on Marty Smith Salient

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"You do the math." Paul Muldoon • New York Times

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"Auden’s nothing is sort of like the “nobody” of the medieval monks who liked to joke about a hero, named Nobody, who existed before creation, who was greater than God. As Odysseus knew, when he introduced himself to the Cyclops as Nemo, Nobody, nothing has always been a good cover for something." Amanda Jernigan • The Walrus

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"Everything Pasolini did, he did as a poet. [...] His best poetry is a kind of diary written in long slabs and sequences—he called these poems poemetti, longer than a poesia, shorter than a poema—meditations on whatever he was thinking about, where the syntax is strung out along the terza-rima form (Dante’s meter!) in a papery festoon of thinking." Adam Thirlwell Bookforum

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"Vanguard poetry, by definition, should be at the forefront of efforts to analyze and illustrate more carefully the changing nature of class formation and relations." Daniel Tiffany Boston Review

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"It’s strangely appropriate, however, that such an ephemeral, resistant missive would house the last words Patrick Galvin committed to print. For it fittingly caps his history as a peripatetic literary activist, the founder not only of Poetry Now in Dublin but also of the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, the incubator of plays and groups of players in London, Belfast and beyond." Billy Ramsell • Stinging Fly

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"Poetry is the weak sister of its sibling arts, alternately ignored and swaddled like a 19th-century invalid, and that will change only by means of a long, tedious and possibly futile effort at persuasion." David Orr • New York Times

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"[Graham] Allen has noted how writing Holes on an iPad has begun to influence his more “conventional poems”, including a “tendency to break through sentential structures” and employing a “different rhythm” to the work." Matthew Geden • Southword

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"But the reach of poetry always had its limits: a poet could only be a misunderstood, isolated creature. This was the existential pose young poets mimicked. [Laura] Riding’s work offered that guise as well." Benjamin Hollander • Brooklyn Rail

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"Pointless weirdness gets old fast (as it got old in Lockwood’s too-clever-by-half first book, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black”), but here the weirdness almost always carries a magnificent, and political, point." Stephen Burt • New York Times

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"In a chorus of diverse female voices such as O’Connor, Campanello and Feeney, no longer must a woman writer lament, like Boland, ‘the absence of an expressed poetic life which would have dignified and revealed mine‘." Doireann Ní Ghríofa • Stinging Fly

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"Tom French’s ability, in this poem and in each of his books, is to find a way into such places, where the “beautifully executed wounds” are shown for what they are." John McAuliffe • Irish Times

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"Poetry became an obsession, and so did Sappho. Twenty-eight years later I published the work of the Greek poetess in the most complete edition we have in Swedish. But in the first instance, it was a meeting that opened up a certain historicity, a certain aspect of – or angle toward, or a certain quality in – time. A temporality, let’s say, that was and still is accessible for me only when I work with, translate, or interpret poetry. Let us simply call it “philological time”." Magnus William-Olsson • Almost Island

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"The translator of poetry must immerse herself fully in the lexical, linguistic, cultural and musical world of each poem she’s translating, and must also, at a certain point, separate herself from that world in order to hear the translated text in its own literary and sound contexts." Rachel Tzvia Back • Marginalia / Los Angeles Review of Books

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"We can see with one eye, but two eyes enable us to see depth. Similarly, with words we can name objects, but syntax, not to mention figurative speech, enables us to see the connectedness of things." Anne Compton • Malahat Review

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"Infinite Jest gave me back to myself, and left me with nowhere to hide. I stopped writing my brittle, evasive poems. I began to wonder how on earth you do something like this." Colin Barrett • Guardian

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"Filming was to take place in the bar of Hotel Eilean Iarmain in Sleat, southern Skye, the idea being that the boys would ask me questions about Gaelic culture and poetry (my line of work) as we addressed and then attacked a haggis." Rody Gorman meets Gerad Depardieu • Guardian

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"I write poetry when I cannot make sense of my present predicament. The process is one of clinging to scarce fragments floating around me and tying them together to avoid drowning." Anne Portugal and Pierre Alferi in conversation with Sophie L. Thunberg • World Literature Today

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"I have a box full of photographs I've taken of clouds! I am certain my Aunt would find them weird and uninteresting, but I can’t help myself . . . whenever there's an interesting cloud formation, I run outside and shoot it. The clouds are written to us, as we are the only ones to receive them, we the living. And what are poems but weather reports? Is there a difference between a poem and a letter? A poem and a cloud?" Mary Ruefle in conversation with Bradley Harrison • Music & Literature

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"[D]espite the strong presence of the first person singular, the first pronoun to enter the poem is plural, and the overall atmosphere, communal. This is heightened by the primacy of the poem’s aphoristic-sounding statements, formed from the verb ‘to be’, which convey a desire for a collective thinking." Emily Critchley • Cambridge Literary Review

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"Particularly fascinating is a hilariously patronising study of American mores, written as a guide to British citizens during the second World War by no less a figure than Louis MacNeice. Meet the US Army, from His Majesty’s Stationery Office, is packed full of sage advice. “Far from being ‘bad form’ it is the expected thing that the crowd should declare its feelings,” the Carrickfergus man notes when discussing American sport." Donald Clarke • Irish Times

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"[Joseph] Brodsky reshaped Virgil’s Arcadia into a snow covered terrain and his Aeneas is a man tormented by the brutalizing price of his heroic destiny." Zara Martirosova Torlone • OUPblog

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"The representation of speed, figured and abstract, was one of the Futurists’ prime aesthetic projects, underpinned by a philosophy of creative destruction that owed its expression to one man, the poet and publicist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, its guru and pope, around whom the entire enterprise pivoted and whose death brought it to an end in 1944. Marinetti was born in 1876 and brought up in Alexandria, Egypt, where he received a French education. As a young poet he was a standard-issue symbolist until an encounter with an engine, mythologized in his “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” published in Le Figaro in 1909, changed everything." Jonathan Galassi • NYRB

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"The epigraphs that begin the sections of his book come from the likes of Whitman, Byron, Montaigne, and . . . Warren Zevon? What would you expect from a poet who holds a D.Phil. from Oxford, works as an antiquarian book dealer, writes libretti, and appears in short films for a post-punk conceptual band?" John Foy • New Criterion

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"He told me once that prose is poetry in the sense that a bird is still a bird when it sits still. And the last image he flung at me, with the glee of a Zen master, his eyes hugging me, his wisdom falling like rose petals from a teacher’s hands was this: “If you want to break a dog’s heart,” he whispered, “throw a stone into the sea.”" Michael Harding on Dermot Healy • Irish Times

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"The Nazi regime, he later said, had proletarianised him: ‘Not only have they robbed me of my house, my fishpond and my car, but they’ve also stolen my stage and my audience.’ He wrote in one of his poems about the ‘man to whom no one is listening’." David Blackbourn on Brecht • LRB

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