"So taken in are we by [Wallace Stevens'} conviction that the fates had dealt him a lousy hand that we’re thrown for a loop when, at age twenty-eight, Stevens—who at the time was working as a legal advisor for the Equitable Life Assurance Company—runs down to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt to discuss getting “the country back on its feet in the wake of the financial downturn.” Pretty impressive. Why, then, wasn’t this level of achievement enough for him? How did he come by his sky-high expectations? To whose life was he comparing his own?" Bruce Bawer • Hudson Review

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" But [Robert] Bridges’s effort had one welcome result. It influenced his daughter, Elizabeth Daryush, who understood from her father that the normal speech stresses of English syllables could offer an exciting sound, and one differing from traditional metric verse. She also realised that a breakdown in regulation could push her poems into a post-First-World-War society. Daryush is possibly the first English poet to write in modern syllabics." Claire Crowther • PN Review

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"I was initially disappointed with its failure to develop the image’s potential, but it actually demonstrates Kathleen Jamie’s ability to use reticence, making a point with apt imagery and a minimum of words." Mike Barlow • The Compass

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"It is in the nature of the provincial poet to see the whole world in the details of the place he or she celebrates. This place is the world, that is the assumption from which the poet proceeds. In the case of Fitzroy, where the population has been drawn from everywhere, the presence of the larger world in the smaller needs no special demonstration. The four hundred biographies, which constitute the biography of the place itself, cover a vast range of lives, occupations, histories, identities, classes and cultures." Ivor Indyk • Sydney Review of Books

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"Like ourselves, a page is opened to stand before us, words are read and lifted from a page, and then felled and put away, closed back into horizontal or vertical form. And the melancholy inherent to an imperfect memory of content when poem or book is closed, is made up for by the aesthetic object, like a stone stacked within memory, as an oblique, lost form requisite for re-entering, rebuilding, and rereading." Claire Potter • Poetry

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"By now, Stein’s letters to Van Vechten were routinely addressed to “Papa Woojums,” Woojums being the name of the family unit that Stein, Toklas, and Van Vechten created for themselves around this time, and in which each adopted a distinct role." Edward White • The Paris Review

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"I think the analogy with visual art is doubly interesting when it comes to the question of narrative. While there is a sort of elliptical story that Loop of Jade tells, particularly in the three long poems about my mother, it’s not the sort of narrative you would encounter in a novel. The story, such as it is, emerges through individual images or fragments, a bit like the panels in a series of narrative paintings where you have to intuit what has happened in the gaps between them." Sarah Howe • Honest Ulsterman

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"There’s formal as well as strategic variety here, but not so much in terms of metre or rhyme. Rather, it’s the visual shape and punctuation of the poems that [Greta] Stoddart plays with. There are two concrete poems, a pear-shaped poem about a pear (which is also, cleverly, a tear-shaped poem about a tear) and a poem about four square windows arranged as a 2×2 grid of prose squares." Stephen Payne • The Compass

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"Like Yeats’ own Last Poems, and The Cantos by Ezra Pound – particularly The Pisan Cantos published in the late 1940s when Kinsella began writing – these poems form a cohesive whole which not only echoes across a wide body of personal opus but an even wider spread of literary and artistic creation." James McCabe on Thomas Kinsella • Irish Times

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"Is it time the award rules were re-drawn to protect the remnants of generic classification, tattered and frayed in the past by modernism, today by marketing? Is it time that more appropriate awards were devised for innovative work that is deliberately careless of genres? Citizen, described by Capildeo as ‘the crystalline aggregation of “microaggressions”’, is out of the ordinary and deserves to be recognised for what it is. But it is not a collection of poems. It is not a book of verse." Michael Schmidt • PN Review

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"On August 11, 1689, towards the end of his Narrow Road, Bashō wrote, ‘What was composed / On the fan is torn apart / And falls together.’ I looked and looked for that tree in my neighbourhood near Bashō’s house, but couldn’t find it in the welter of streets and buildings from the long perspective of the sky-deck. Still, I knew it was there." Emily Grosholz • PN Review

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"The question of the civic responsibility of the poet, and the abdication of that responsibility, was thrown time and again at Northern Irish writers. " Sean Hewitt • Irish Times

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"The effect is as if an exquisite acoustic player had gone electric – a louder, dirtier sound, not universally welcomed, but necessary at the time as a working through of angers and despairs, a digesting and regurgitating of the too-muchness of post-modernity." Harry Clifton • DRB

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"The genius, like Barthes’ author, is very much a modern figure, produced (as Barthes has it) as our society “discovered the prestige of the individual,” and in good measure the result of capitalism, with its emphasis on the individual over the collective, its contempt for old rules and love of “creative destruction,” and its emphasis on everything—even individual style—as a kind of property. But is it likely to remain with us?" Robert Archambeau • B O D Y

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"Relating works of art to one’s life, after all, is easy. (No reference library required.) Moreover, the confessional voice is dangerously attractive; as Virginia Woolf put it, “under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full.” Such a voice doesn’t necessarily guarantee more honest criticism, and, in some ways, its subtle designs on the reader make it even more deserving of our wariness." Jason Guriel • The Walrus

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"The poet, critic and translator Jeffrey Wainwright (b. 1944) calls this “tall talk” and “plain talk” and readily admits he is always impatient “to get on to the big number”. For elegists, caught between their intimacy with the dead and the utter unknowability of death, the division between the lyrical and the real runs particularly deep." Andrew McCulloch • TLS

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"[Goldsmith] was capable of cherishing authorship as a possible source of independence and respectability, and of reviling it as base enslavement to poor public taste." Aileen Douglas • Irish Times

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"The idea that “Australian poetry” exists is not a foregone conclusion, nor yet that a nation — Australia or otherwise — can be 
justified. Certainly, in the age of Wi-Fi, linguistic traditions based on geography, ethnicity, and political allegiances are contestable and 
increasingly difficult to discern. " Bronwyn Lea • Poetry

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"However, just as the boy finds his own voice, or rather, his own ‘chats’ – just as Chingonyi names himself in the poem: ‘k to the a to the y to the o’ (26) – culture shifts. Hip hop replaces Garage, one white American voice overpowering many black British voices, and the boy is back to learning someone else’s words. Chingonyi arranges linguistic and rhythmic variations within stanzas that visually resemble prose paragraphs, conveying the experiences of being surrounded, being spoken over, and transposing oneself in an attempt to be heard." Nisha Ramayya • Ambit

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"“One of Whitman’s core beliefs was that the body was the basis of democracy,” Mr. Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, continued. “The series is a hymn to the male body, as well as a guide to taking care of what he saw as the most vital unit of democratic living.”" Jennifer Schuessler • NYT

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