"To learn to enjoy a poet, and to think we understand what a poet is doing, is to learn to understand that poet's conventions: to see what's new, and what's changed, in poets who seem (at first) to repeat themselves, and to recognize patterns, repetitions, inheritance in work that seems alien, chaotic, or all too new." Stephen Burt • Yale Review

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"In sum, anyone can be a poet, and poetry appears indeed to be popular. But what is meant here, or should be meant, by poetry? What is its value?" Catharine Savage Bronson • Chronicles

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"It’s time to write the obituary for New Formalism." Quincy R. Lehr • Raintown Review

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"Apologies for making this personal, but this in miniature is the precise problem that has always bedevilled literary critics: the problem of how to balance feeling and fact, and how to translate subjective response (I love this poem) into informed judgment (this is a great poem)." Daniel Swift • The Spectator

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"Encountering Wilson’s latest poems is akin to coming upon an orchid in the wild. Just as the carnal beauty of the plant stuns, a sonic richness, exotic (because precise) word-choice, and sculptural beauty in The Great Medieval Yellows encourage me to remain on the surface of the work." Karla Kelsey Constant Critic

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"Because I am best acquainted with Armantrout’s relatively recent work, I was eager, for this series pairing a second book of poetry written over 20 years ago with a recently published second poetry collection, to locate Armantrout’s first two books, and to take a special look into the second to see something of the roots of this remarkable writer, who is associated with the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, but who also, like any original artist allied with any school or group, is very much her own stylist." Lisa Russ Spaar LARB

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"When first published, The Shoshoneans offered concise and relevant insights into Dorn’s poetic ambitions. Nonetheless, these insights have had to wait for the retrospective and analytic framing of the current republication in order to come fully to view." Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz Chicago Review

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"Truth be told, even in the best of times, I’ve never been especially sweet on slice-of-life poems, particularly ones with a smarty pants edge." Wendy Willis LARB

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"As a first collection Beauty/Beauty reveals an emerging voice with a distinctive feel about it." Mike Barlow on Rebecca Perry and others The Compass

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"The point is not that the poem is cooked or raw, made or found, but that when we look at it we believe we see its wings move and its bright body shifting." David Orr NYT

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"Here was major style. As if the world had been made as guilty pleasure. And what a relief from the more autobiographically-sourced, formally constricted, and directly ethical poets that I had admired and was trying to be and love still." Rodney Jones Partisan

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"At a certain point, I realised that researching the historical record was inhibiting me. The poem went cold and progress slowed. In the end it took five years to complete, and only when I knew I was nearly finished did I begin a second wave of research, in which I tried to check that the things I’d invented weren’t too far off the mark. In the mean time, what helped me to bring my characters back to life (to me anyway) was thinking of three less obviously relevant figures: Tony Blair, Nick Leeson, and Myra Hindley." Paul Batchelor Poetry

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"Who’s afraid of Frederick Seidel?" Eric Powell • Chicago Review

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"I go to poetry for engagement with language and for revelations that are momentary rather than longer-term." Paul Muldoon • PN Review

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"Read as a kind of kin or precursor to the movement’s evolution of protest and artistic testimony, Rich’s choices as she navigated her own American times help illuminate how the broader Black Lives Matter moment relates to the arts of past liberation efforts." Joshua Jacobs • The Critical Flame

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"Having found modern philosophy to be a “logomachy,” as he called it some years later in a letter to his mother, he decided to reject the fellowship Harvard offered him; instead he put English roots down by marrying Vivien Haigh-Wood in June of 1915. He did some teaching at London’s Highgate School where, among the usual academic subjects, he also “taught” baseball." William H Pritchard on TS Eliot • Hudson Review

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"I used to ignore where Rich’s poem was going. I was young enough that I just loved meeting the fox in the night and thinking of myself as all that female potential, "a vixen’s courage in vixen terms"." Ailbhe Darcy • The Critical Flame

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"One poem I miss was about Mr. Drummond’s identification with Charlie Chaplin. Another was a morosely comic depth charge titled “Motionless Faces.” It read in part: “Acquaintances dead, teacher dead. Enemy dead. Fiancée dead, girl friends dead. Engineer dead, passenger dead. Unrecognizable body dead: a man’s? an animal’s? Dog dead, bird dead. Rosebush dead, orange trees dead. Air dead, bay dead. Hope, patience, eyes, sleep, movement of hands: dead.” Its absence is a bit of petit larceny." Dwight Garner • NYT

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"Frost’s inaugural words weren’t the last ones, though. “The Gift Outright” endures in the version reproduced here. And other poets have capitalized on its problems, on what it says not only about American politics but also about political poeticizing. They use the uncertain occasion Frost keeps offering; they pay tribute in further questions." Siobhan Phillips • Poetry

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"Many things about fairies, indeed, are most uncertain. We do not even know whether they die." WB Yeats • Irish Times (1890)

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"Not eating replaced poetry, for Glück. But it also prevented it. Glück sought treatment when she worried that her disease would impede the work she needed to do." Siobhan Phillips • Massachusetts Review

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"There are poets who’ve been responsible for helping open up the readership of American poetry in Britain, including Elaine Feinstein, who allied herself with America’s Black Mountain poets during the ’60s and ’70s (Charles Olson sent her his famous letter defining breath “prosody”), and more recently, Roddy Lumsden (who has apparently clocked up the most appearances by any British poet in Poetry) and Ahren Warner (current poetry editor of Poetry London). Lumsden is also series editor and instigator of the Best British Poetry annual anthology series modeled on Best American Poetry, published since 2011 by Salt (regrettably that former poetry press’s only surviving excursion into poetry), which along with the annual Forward Prize anthologies, and the journals Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, PN Review, and Poetry Review, showcase the latest work by the best-known figures in British and Irish poetry, with American poets also featured regularly in Poetry London, PN Review, Poetry Review, and The Dark Horse." Neil Astley Ploughshares

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