"Citizen includes extracts from documentary film scripts, screengrabs of Zinedine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi at the 2006 World Cup, JMW Turner’s painting The Slave Ship and an essay on Venus Williams. Rankine, who was born in Jamaica and now lives in California, teaching at the University of Southern California, wins £10,000." Mark Brown • Guardian

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"Someone could write a Ph.D. thesis on the role that inherited wealth has played in the history of American poetry. James Russell Lowell, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Laughlin, Isabella Gardner, Frederick Seidel, and Harry Matthews all, with varying artistic results, benefited from it. As did James Merrill. Not only does money talk, it also sometimes writes poetry." Alfred Corn • The Smart Set

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"Une des plus grandes voix de la poésie américaine, C.K. Williams, s'est éteint dimanche 20 septembre à son domicile, dans le New Jersey. Il avait 78 ans." Le Figaro

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"I was going for something like Frost’s voice. Frost strikes me as Hesiodic in some ways, with the pastoral surface, the home-spun wisdom, but also the sophisticated erudition." A.E. Stallings • Partisan

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"Capitalism has nothing to fear from an identity-driven struggle of any kind. As long as resentful white male poets feel entitled to assume the identities of the marginalised in a quixotic battle against political correctness, and as long as the marginalised wage their own equally quixotic battles in defence of cultural authenticity and identity fetishism, nothing will change." Ali Alizadeh • Sydney Review of Books

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"Two orders of magnitude, you might say: Enzensberger, born in 1929, who has bestrode German poetry since the late 1950s, who was associated with Boll and Grass in Group 47, who grew up in the west, but were fiercely critical of it. And Jan Wagner , born in Hamburg in 1971, who has won more prizes in Germany than you can shake a stick at, though not the same ones as HME, apparently." Ian Pople • Manchester Review

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"Experimental work always forces us to imagine analogous genres around it: Citizen: An American Lyric , Rankine’s new book, has the same subtitle as her previous book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004)." Lauren Berlant • BOMB

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""It was on those long solo flights," [Scott Griffin] tells his audience at the TEDx Talk, "that I rediscovered the joy of reciting poetry." Around the same time, he discovered the money to be made in manufacturing arms components." Michael Lista • Canadaland

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"I have not found a definition of the lyric essay which compels me, though I have spent much time contemplating the matter of the “essay,” and just as much the “lyric.”" Carissa Pobre • High Chair

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"No poet has more closely woven poetry into her daily life, a poetry that is personal but never confessional; she guarded her privacy and that of her three children and husband of nearly 70 years with the clear knowledge that though there was nothing to hide, there was plenty to protect. What her art, as affectionate as it was astringent, required—first and last—was form: for her, formal prosody was essential; it was enabling." Eleanor Wilner on Maxine Kumin

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"Wieners’s poetic legacy since his death has remained somewhat marginal. His work has been positioned in social proximity to the beats, despite considerable aesthetic differences; and it remains adjunct in the legacy of The New American Poetry, perhaps due to his deviances and lack of work in print." Nat Raha • Critical Flame

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"There’s no one like a poet for pure jealousy of another’s advantage." David Mason • Hudson Review

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"Compulsory reverence, on the one hand, open contempt on the other: these two extremes combined to leave Mayakovsky’s legacy, as poet and man, radically underexplored." Clare Cavanagh • TLS

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"Poetry provides a place to dwell. It is not a literary "selfie." It formalizes, and actually creates a certain kind of experience." J Todd Billings • Huffington Post

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"The possibilities of space, whether in Gloucestershire or Somerset, in Tuscany or New Mexico, the perceiving eye’s (as against the “I”’s) relation to it, and that relationship as recorded by other arts and artists, continued to preoccupy Tomlinson in a way that placed him outside the Anglo-American mainstream, whether that was embodied by Lowell or Larkin. He became a standing (or moving) reproach to the insularity of the Movement, and Larkin in particular." Alan Jenkins • TLS

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"Elsewhere, though, and often, Tóibín nails it. He demonstrates the possibility of coming to life in someone else’s poem, in the long labor of sorting through and returning to it like any important event in one’s life. (Here, too, he reminds me of Bishop.)" Jonathan Farmer • Slate

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"Likewise the power of so many literary evocations of night which rely upon our understanding that after dark the familiar daytime landscape and objects are still there, ready to use in stories, paintings, songs, and poems; still there, ready to be seen in the mind’s eye; still there, yet transformed by moonlight, shadow, chill air, diminished sense of depth; still there, “arranging, deepening, enchanting night.”" Daniel Bosch • Fortnightly Review

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"We drank and talked and read poems – this was new to me - and I read a translation of an old anonymous Irish one that was wild and like a prayer, and I read it well. ‘Anonymous, he’s the best,’ said Dermot. ‘Because he doesn’t give a fuck.’" Philip O Ceallaigh remembers Dermot Healy • Stinging Fly

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"I still wonder what my father might have written had he more time to contemplate his fate." Mick Heaney • Irish Times

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"The best gift that a poet can give his or her I is to allow it to be its own cool animal. An I that is a wild thing, a mercurial trickster that resists all definition." Dorothea Lasky • Wave Composition

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"Hence [PJ] Kavanagh’s admiration for the different yet complementary work of fellow poets such as that of his American friend Peter Kane Dufault, who wrote what he called “nature poems for grownups,” and, despite their occasional, fierce disagreements, that of Peter Redgrove (with whom he once undertook a drunken road trip together in a borrowed car around the west of Ireland)." Michael Caines Guardian "In a sad coincidence recently, an email announcing this year’s Patrick Kavanagh weekend arrived at around the same time I learned about the death of the other Patrick Kavanagh, the English one better known as “P.J.”" Frank McNally Irish Times

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"[A]s I began to consider the women whose poems I have most admired in the last half-century it seemed to me that concern with the intimate rather than the social made for a peculiar integrity; that if poetry these days was less windblown by the excitements of the public world it was possibly no bad thing. In lyric poetry, certainly – which has been the great strength of poetry in the last half-century – an exploration of the personal has the authority of lived experience." Elaine Feinstein • PN Review

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"No, he could not and would not “cut down” his manuscript. As he says in “With the Approach of the Oak the Axeman Quakes,” “You know there is no other poet on earth like me.” He may have been bragging, but he was speaking an undeniable truth." John Bradley on Frank Stanford • Rain Taxi

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"Gregerson’s syntax acts as a strong forward current, carving a jagged path through the stony resistance of her lines and stanzas. Her best-known poems are written in the form of “Salt”: a three-line helix-like stanza with a corseted middle line, a shape that she invented and which Gregerson, not given to hyperbole, says “saved my life.”" Dan Chiasson • New Yorker

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"Connecting with nature, Wordsworth suggested in Lyrical Ballads, sometimes means being prepared to up and “quit your books”, romping through forest foliage rather than the “barren leaves” of the academy." Sam Solnick TLS

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"It’s occurred to me that since William Carlos Williams was a doctor, he, of all people, would have known about any negative molecular consequences of plum refrigeration." Sadie Stein • Paris Review

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"The dynamic noise of a poetry workshop, its communal imperative, does compel young poets to be clear rather than complex, to be social rather than desolate. But the best education in the poetic art must oscillate between the two — between the need to dream fiercely and the need to communicate." Thomas McCarthy Poetry

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"The party slogan, “Great Humanity,” comes from a poem by Nâzım Hikmet, whom many consider the greatest twentieth-century Turkish poet, though he spent most of his career in prison or in exile because of his Marxist views." Elif Batuman • New Yorker

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