"[Michael] Robbins’s voice is hotheaded and hapless, a little bit country and a little left of center." Jason Guriel • New Republic

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"I’m going to invent a rival poet, or perhaps two, who will gradually become much better than me—then the people who resent me for one reason or another, will line up to support one of my rivals (i.e. me)." Ted Hughes • The American Reader

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"[T]he older you get, the more artificial it all seems." Joe Wenderoth • BOMB Magazine

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"Nobody would wish to have cancer, yet it undeniably brought things to my life that were, to my great surprise, valuable." Elise Partridge • The Puritan

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"If it’s true that a generation is coming to maturity for which the stand-off between mainstream and experimental poetry no longer holds, then Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s first book, along with the second collections by Paul Batchelor and Oli Hazzard – all of them English poets born between 1977 and 1986 – marks a decisive moment." Matthew Sperling • New Statesman

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"My husband Rob started a literary magazine with some friends called jubilat. They would publish an interview with a perfumer, a list of wrestling terms, and lots of poems, with no distinction. It was a way of saying, All of these things are poetry, which is the case for me too." Matthea Harvey • The Believer

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"Whenever I sit down to write, I have to think through certain questions about form – am I or am I not going to write a sonnet? If I don’t count syllables how do I communicate a tune? If I rhyme, whose voice am I putting on?" Alice Oswald • The White Review

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"There was a ferocity in Heraclitus. If we juxtapose two of his more famous sayings, ‘shit is somewhat better than a corpse,’ and ‘character is destiny,’ we might find that a kind of urgency about life emerges." Raphael Maurice • Like Starlings

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"That’s the joy of good poetry: it condenses meaning into a tiny linguistic espresso. This makes it tougher and more resilient than fictional prose, more able to withstand all manner of interpretations." Aaron Bady • The New Inquiry

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"This is all part of the inquiry that French poet and translator Yves Bonnefoy identified as essential to capturing the spirit or essence of a work in translation: You don’t want your car to take you to the supermarket and back; you want it to sail from the woods to a farm to a city to a beach clogged with kites and back again." Evan Fleischer • Electric Literature

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"My job, for part of a summer, was to help clean up the tons of cement that escape during processing and accumulate where they aren’t supposed to be." Joshua Mehigan • Work In Progress

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"The poetry world is so like the fashion world that way, isn’t it? Trend-driven and often emptily stylish. The only difference is that at least fashion recognizes and makes the distinction between prêt-à-porter and haute couture, a line that for all intents and purposes is the bottom line. People buy and wear and live in the former, and only marvel curiously at the latter." Michael Lista • Maisonneuve

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"The thought of a poet writing in English who would not grow excited turning the pages of the OED, or clicking on the electronic version, is so dismal that one wishes such a personage an even smaller readership than modern poets normally manage to acquire." Alan Wall on Geoffrey Hill • Fortnightly Review

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"For Larkin, writing poems was above all the art of becoming memorable, by means, as he said, of 'a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely'." Jeremy Noel-Tod • Literary Review

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"[James] Pollock is a poet of understatement; he puts the poem before the poet." Richard Merelman • Verse Wisconsin

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"This looks like minimalism, but it is the utter subsumption of experience in phonemes. It is maximal word-as-world." Ange Mlinko on Peter Gizzi • Boston Review

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"At a reading in Kilkenny, Lowell recalled the best and kindest introduction he’d ever heard a poet give: “I’m going to read six poems, and it’s going to take 37 minutes.”" Maureen Kennelly • Irish Times

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"Also, you’re glad that someone else has sensed that animals know we are frauds. Your colleague’s goldfish, your neighbor’s cat, the panther at the zoo—these creatures truly belong on earth, whereas you are just a cosmic tourist, a hopelessly transient stranger." Drew Calvert • The American Reader

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"[Elizabeth] Arnold is not afraid to discuss the edgeless nature of life." Liz McGehee • The Volta

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"In Rome, the poet is less wolf cub than panther, not inquisitively circling and observing its subject matter, but attacking it mercilessly as prey." Isabel Ortiz on Dorothea Lasky • Feministing

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"Thomas’s work was belittled by Kingsley Amis and Larkin; Geoffrey Grigson, with a mixture of typical acidity and perception, described it as Victorian subject matter clothed in symbolist rhetoric – in essence no more than a final, eccentric flowering of Romanticism. There is a true insight here into Thomas’s Romantic sensibility (“Gothic” would also suit him); but what this judgement misses is the sheer iron discipline of his work, in which every word and every placement of a word is tested over and over until we have a poetry that is “saturated”." Rowan Williams on Dylan Thomas • New Statesman

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"[Clive] James, who was diagnosed with leukaemia and emphysema in 2010 and who is being treated in Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge, writes in The Emperor's Last Words of how "I gather my remaining senses / For the walk, or limp, to town", where he has a haircut, and visits an Oxfam bookshop." Alison Flood • Guardian

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"While Hugo may have stood tall in the literary world, to Hansen he was just Dick. The man who bought her a horse and at 16 her first car, a 1968 big block Camaro, gray with black racing stripes." Larry Coonrod • The Lincoln County Dispatch

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"[Ed] Skoog’s associative leaps can make the poems in Rough Day seem fragmentary, but read as a whole, the book feels less like a collection of disparate pieces than like a single, continuous, wide-ranging monologue." Katie Herman • B O D Y

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"Leopardi suggested, back in the early 1800s, that good writing comes of nature, not habit. Good luck teasing the import of that remark through the eye of a needle." Norm Sibum • Encore

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"While his contemporaries have been busy fine-tuning their algorithms, tweaking their genomes and re-mystifying their obscurantisms, [Joshua] Mehigan has been perfecting his lucid, plain-spoken, perspicuous ear worms that scan and rhyme and stick to your rib. " Michael Lista • National Post

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"In the volume under review, [David Scott] also writes poems ‘On Not Knowing R.S. Thomas’, on David Jones, and on James Fenton’s father, Canon John Fenton, a noted New Testament authority and Canon of Christ Church Oxford. I would imagine that he would also like mentioned his poems on Winston Churchill, Gertrude Jekyll and Sappho! But others have called him a priest-poet in the tradition of Herbert, and that doesn’t seem like such a bad starting point." Ian Pople Manchester Review

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