"The book is packed with terrific close readings, which often feel as if Hofmann is humming along with the poems he discovers for us, dwelling on each word until its particular resonances for the poem under discussion become apparent to all. (Is Hofmann’s workshop the place where New Criticism went?)." John McAuliffe • Poetry Review

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"[Jon] Silkin’s poems have a didactic, even rabbinical, quality at times. His sermons can be knotty and difficult to follow, and sometimes sound a little portentous. But this poem, written when he was around thirty, and first published in The Re-Ordering of the Stones, has the manner of a restrained cri de coeur. Its argument is incontrovertible, like a newly delivered prophecy." Carol Rumens • Guardian

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"Yet sometimes truly fresh ideas are promulgated through poems too; they may seem weird, unpoetic, ghastly, even illiterate." Bruce Whiteman • Hudson Review

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"Atlantic, Harper's, they're all diminished. All magazines lose from the Internet. Eventually, they'll all be on the wire. Donald Hall • Union Leader

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"This encounter is not the sole focus of the section. He includes poems by other authors and discusses how they make daring statements. But [Carl] Phillips's account of this sexual encounter dominates the section. In fact, it dominates the book. Has a book dedicated to the craft of writing ever included such explicit, autobiographical material from an esteemed educator and writer? Clearly, Phillips is not only interested in describing daring, he wants to wholeheartedly participate in it." Mike Puican • The Collagist

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" I like doing close readings with my students, taking a hard, close look inside poems, hearing them notice things I might not. I like how, between us, we help each other pay sustained attention to the ways in which poems work. I think I’m able to give my students help and insight when it comes to improving individual poems and thinking about poetry as a discipline and as an art, and maybe some of that’s acquired from my practice as a poet, though maybe more from what I read. You always learn from good poems, though, whether by students of the craft or by poets of a lifetime’s experience. But I also know that if I had to teach every day of the calendar year, I’d never write poetry. For that, I need privacy, silence and time to let my thought process unravel so words can, if I’m lucky, occur to me in some kind of unforeseen, unaccountable way." Vona Groarke • Irish Times

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"I have never made money from selling rare poetry volumes." Richie McCaffery • The Dark Horse

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"Poetry has saved my life, made my life. Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline." Victoria Kennefick • Irish Times

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"The poem, which is called 'Gatwick', is a fantasy about a young official at passport control." Guardian Books Blog " If I worried about bad readers, I’d have given up writing poetry long ago." Craig Raine • New Statesman

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"[John] Lucas confirmed that impression, saying of [BS] Johnson’s stint as poetry editor of the Transatlantic Review that “he behaved with great generosity as well as I think scrupulousness towards a lot of younger persons including myself who were sending him poems”. Lucas met Johnson in 1966, when, as a young lecturer at Nottingham University, he went to hear him give a talk there. On this occasion another aspect of Johnson’s personality was in evidence: “Johnson spent more or less the entire hour attacking the world of academe, and pointing out that people who were in the world of academe could be expected to understand nothing about literature at all”." Catharine Morris • TLS

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"Yet no Jew walking through the door of American literary life at this time would have dreamed of writing in any terms other than the ones that the Allen Tates had established. The literature of the period that engages the issue of anti-Semitism—from Laura Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement to Arthur Miller’s Focus to Saul Bellow’s The Victim—says it all. The boldness of these books lay in writing about Jews; it did not lie in sounding like Jews." Vivian Gornick The Nation

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"But the more closely we examine [Claudia] Rankine’s second-person subject, the more complex these questions become. “To everyone who generously shared their stories, thank you,” Rankine writes in the book’s acknowledgments. We discover, only at the end of this grievous testament, that we may have been reading the story of a composite you from the beginning. Perhaps the most brilliant innovation of Citizen lies in Rankine’s construction of this composite “you” which—as the dark double of Whitman’s first-person polity—allows us to register a plurality of unanswerable injustices through the felt urgency of an individual subject." Srikanth Reddy • Lana Turner

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"Much of the poem is closed off to the reader — the situation is rendered in only the broadest of strokes, filtered through a speaker who isn’t forthcoming on the details. It makes for a strange sort of intimacy — on the one hand, the poem makes us privy to a private moment between two people. On the other hand, why that moment is particularly important is a mystery." Rebecca Hazelton • Poetry

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"Yeats is 150." Eavan Boland, Denis Donoghue, Roy Foster, Terry Wogan et al Irish Times

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"Even now I routinely misquote the second sentence, but who could forget the first? I, too, dislike it has been on repeat in my head since 1993; when I open a laptop to write or a book to read: I, too, dislike it echoes in my inner ear. When a poet (including me) is being introduced at a reading, whatever else I hear, I hear: I, too, dislike it. When I teach I basically hum it." Ben Lerner • LRB

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"Delmore Schwartz was born in Brooklyn in 1913 into a household where more Yiddish than English was spoken, and the family relation to the world was characterized by a mix of crude and shrewd that is common to those profoundly not at home in the culture they inhabit." Vivian Gornick • The Nation

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"Betrayal, murder, madness, maiming—Lear’s hard to beat. Just run through some of its mounting negatives in your head: “Nothing will come of Nothing”; “Never. Never. Never. Never. Never”; “They could not, would not do ’t”; “No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison”; and “No, no; no life?” The articulation of “what is not” is breathtaking. " David Yezzi • Partisan

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"Former winner Ciaran Carson makes the cut for the £10,000 prize for From Elsewhere, in which the Irish poet sets translations from the French poet Jean Follain against “original” poems inspired by those translations. Another award-winning Irish poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, is picked by judges for The Boys of Bluehill, a look at memory and time." Alison Flood Guardian

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"Over the phone in the fall of 1990, Miłosz described where to catch the bus to his house and cautioned me about the many “lacunae” in the bus schedule. I knew then I’d caught the golden ring of part-time jobs." Molly Wesling • Brick

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"Readers uncertain whether they will enjoy 500 pages of [Craig] Raine’s inventive, frequently charming, but unapologetically opinionated company should turn to the piece inspired by the time Mary Whitehouse threatened to prosecute him for a sonnet titled “Arsehole”." Jeremy Noel-Tod • The Telegraph

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"For admirers of [Ciaran] Carson’s poetry, From Elsewhere is a vital new part of his remarkable oeuvre. " Farisa Khalid • Asymptote

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"It has been apparent for some time that Cole is the most important American poet under sixty. His late work has made the bland, generic poems of so many in his generation an embarrassment." William Logan • New Criterion

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"Poetry: it’s more entertaining than anything Simon Cowell ever produced, and far more vicious." Sophie Heawood • Guardian

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"“My family has been here forever. We’ve been in town for over 130 years,” said Williams-Fox, 52, an attorney who is the granddaughter of William Carlos Williams, a famed poet who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize and was a family doctor in his native Rutherford for decades." Mark Bonamo • PolitickerNJ

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"If we were to make a mosaic of images of white sadness, we would naturally choose obvious, archetypal ones: the kitchen where Sylvia Plath commits suicide; Ally Sheedy, in Goth pancake makeup, crawling across the floor of the school library in The Breakfast Club (1985); Ian Curtis intoning “Love Will Tear Us Apart”; Neddy Merrill, in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” surfacing from his last swimming pool and finding his entire life swept away.” Jess Row • Boston Review

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"On a recent trip to Florida, I decided to go in search of a city that exists only in my mind: Donald Justice's Miami.” Kyle Churney • Chicago Tribune

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