"I wanted to argue the case for what it was like to be a young woman in a country where the images of women in the poetry were often fixed and inert: They were queens and sibyls or signifiers of Irish nationhood rather than real women with real lives. " Eavan Boland • Stanford Report

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"As a return to the sixties — the lettering is Bloodaxe’s standard, but its orange-and-lemon-on-drab echoes the variants of Rubber Soul, and the Jane Bown cover photograph of the poet (“in the 1960s”) looking ruddy-cheeked, back-combed and even a touch horsey, sporting maybe the ruins of some white lipstick, and otherwise bedizened in zip-up ankle boots, checkered wool (Jaeger?!) pants, and a deeply comfortable, even much-loved-looking baby blue sweater, with a period glass of milky Nescafe, a purse, and a tatty stack of books on the table in front of her, holding a Bic Biro: somewhere between Julie Christie and the younger Camilla Parker-Bowles." Michael Hofmann on Rosemary Tonks • Poetry

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"Today’s storm – the globalizing force and dizzying technologies of late capitalism – can give an ordinary individual astonishing experiences of power, yet it also utterly overwhelms him or her." Ailbhe Darcy on Justin Quinn • Poetry International

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"He asked our names. I told him mine and he said, “That sounds familiar. I have a son who goes by that.” Then he said, “Imagine how I must feel among friends with names like Donald Justice and Galway Kinnell and W.S. Merwin” — he drew out the syllables, as though he were saying “Rockefeller” and “Vanderbilt” and “DuPont.” “Lucky sons-of-bitches, put on earth with poets’ names. And here I am, Phil Levine from Detroit.”." Mark Levine on Philip Levine • Poetry Foundation

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"‘Is the Bible sexist?’ pondered a poster in the sixth-form centre, hoping to entice at least a couple of people along to that week’s lunchtime discussion group." Flora de Falbe • The Missing Slate

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"But before we begin to categorize his poetry, it is helpful to perceive that Russian conceptualism, at least as [Lev] Rubinstein and others practice it, is not focused on a shell into which content is purposefully or accidentally “poured,” but is best conceived as a literary form into which very specific, even if quite disjunctive content is shaped by the poet into a more abstract expression of ideas." Douglas Messerli • Hyperallergic

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"For Venuti, a translation practice like Pinsky’s or Padgett’s — indeed, the translation practice of most translators in most places at most times — is philosophically and morally compromised." V Joshua Adams Nonsite

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"Although writing and storytelling are an end in themselves, any book that has as its backdrop a national setting packs a bigger punch. Fiacha Fola: Blood Debts is a personal story set against a national scandal. With A lesson in Can’t, not only is there a national backdrop, there is an international dimension also." Celia de Freine Irish Times

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"This passing on of unique biographical vignettes of past poets is part of the glue that makes up poetry friendships, especially from one generation to the next. It is how we understand poetic genealogy, for we make up our own class in a sense, our own tribe, a tribe based on the art. In that regard it is utterly egalitarian. Who your parents were or what your skin colour happens to be or how much money you have doesn’t really count for much." Spencer Reece Granta

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"For what is easier today, in English specifically, than to bring up a negative association with anything Arabic or Muslim and then juxtapose it to the grand, diverse American or Western “we”?" Fady Joudah Kenyon Review

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"The explosions of New York’s youthful little magazines around 1964 are, as Kane argues, often countercultural, but clusters of poets turned to modernists and modernisms as related and as various as Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Dada, surrealism, and others to reflect their versions of contemporaneity." Stephanie Anderson Nonsite

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"As you might expect, Paper Bullets contains plenty of gleeful bawdiness. [Julie] Kane is a poet who will blithely rhyme “watch” with “crotch.”." A.E. Stallings • Light Poetry Magazine

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"It was Poe, for example, who suggested, in a Marginalia note in 1848, that some “ambitious man” should undertake the writing of a book to be called “My Heart Laid Bare”, which, “if true to its title”, would be so daring that “The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen”." Marjorie Perloff • TLS

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"Without realizing it, I had been talking in "poet voice" — that affected, lofty, even robotic voice many poets use when reading their work out loud." Matt Petronzio • Mashable

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"This feeling of waiting to be called forward must be felt acutely by four or five excellent poets of [Harry] Clifton’s generation. That call doesn’t come too often." Tom McCarthy Dublin Review of Books

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"In my opinion, we do an enormous “let them eat cake” disservice to our community when we obfuscate the circumstances that help us write, publish and in some way succeed." Ann Bauer • Salon

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"So expected now, indeed, may be his virtuoso handling of the unexpected, that the moments which genuinely shock can be those slightly jarring lines where the poet chooses to expose himself at ground level, without the tricks of the trade. If arcane language puts some barriers between the self and a truth he doesn’t want to face, at other times the straight-talking, tonally less familiar Muldoon also intrudes – almost involuntarily it seems – on his own complex poetic structure." Fran Brearton • Guardian "If Cuthbert and the Otters does not seem to have “naturalized” its wild connections (although, as always with Muldoon, this reader may be missing something obvious and revealing about the poem’s set-up), the same cannot be said about Dirty Data, the book’s closing tour de force." John McAuliffe • Irish Times

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"It’s hard to be a straight male poet." Joey Connolly • Faber Academy

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"The poetry critic is a different creature, evolved within a different ecosystem, whose resemblance to most critics of fiction is not much closer than honeyeaters to chickens." Ben Etherington • Sydney Review of Books

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"Baraka knew he was wound tight. “I am a mean hungry sorehead,” he writes. “Do I have the capacity for grace??”" Dwight Garner • New York Times

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"What’s so noteworthy about Frost’s recitation at Kennedy’s inauguration is not, I would argue, his ability to recall “The Gift Outright,” but the fact that he gave up the printed poem he had available and recited from memory instead — inclining, on a national stage, away from the values of print and toward the values of orality." Mike Chasar Poetry

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"The spectre of illness hangs over The Exiles’ Gallery, the Vancouver writer Elise Partridge’s third collection of poetry, which will be published in April." Mark Medley • The Globe & Mail

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"Every other poet was starting one forty years ago, so we thought, Why not us? Ours was to be called Gastronomic Poetry. Both Mark and I had noticed at poetry readings that whenever food was mentioned in a poem—and that didn’t happen very often—blissful smiles would break out on the faces of people in the audience. Thus, we reasoned, in a country where most people hate poetry and everyone is eating and snacking constantly, poems ought to mention food more frequently." Charles Simic • NYRB

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"Poets had to do more than that. Raised in a country that pompously declared five-year plans could be achieved in four, Tomaž [Šalamun] insisted on highly individual poems that irreverently bared all our cruelty, hypocrisy and callowness for all to see." André Naffis-Sahely • Paris Review

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"Nobody but an adolescent bore wants to be famous for his person." David Mason on Derek Walcott • Hudson Review

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