"If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it." Anne Carson Observer

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"Excessive talkativity is the condition that threatens all of Kennard’s writing, a pressure that he copes with by naming, embracing the problem." Dai George Poetry London "On reaching Book III [of Luke Kennard's Cain] I felt like I’d come out of a cinema into the brightness of a sunny afternoon and was struggling to see clearly. " Katherine Stansfield Magma

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"On into his thirties, whenever Larkin had to take a train somewhere, he’d carry little notes of his own to hand to the ticket agent: a bad stammer would flare at the first shyness, and he couldn’t always count on being able to relay his destination. Then there was the poor eyesight marring his student days, which also kept him from military service. Is it idle to read Larkin’s turn to photography, of all pursuits, in light of these facts? Perhaps one of the early attractions of the camera, which he picked up in his youth (and we have this to thank for an endearingly comic picture of his father Sydney looking through a lens of his own at the eleven-year-old portraitist), was the way it allowed him to escape from the first difficulty and transcend the second." Tomas Unger Threepenny Review

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"In 1995, Jon Stallworthy’s biography of the poet Louis MacNeice appeared to generally favourable reviews. It was recognised as an urbane, courteous study of a poet who had never quite escaped a reputation for playing second fiddle to WH Auden. For this reader, however, it did not manage to grasp how turbulent had been the life from which the poet’s marvellous poems had sprung." Terence Brown DRB

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"The shadow of ballad or hymn meter haunts Riley’s fragmented parts, as does the spirit of song itself, which for all its elegiac purposes can never not be a sign of vitality. In an interview with the Web publication The Shearsman Review, Riley remarked of her career: “The only constant is a commitment to the thing that is song. This is in some way linked to the persistence of hope. Then as I get older this whole business of ‘song’ only becomes still more mysterious. It is a plain bright mystery.” Song is in dialogue with the “say” of Say Something Back, enacted between loftier rhyming stanzas and colloquial blank verse. Rhymes and rhythms assert themselves, then falter. It’s stop and go, this resumption of life after death." Ange Mlinko The Nation

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"“His gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres,” [Bob] Dylan went on. “In the song ‘Sisters of Mercy,’ for instance, the verses are four elemental lines which change and move at predictable intervals . . . but the tune is anything but predictable. The song just comes in and states a fact. And after that anything can happen and it does, and Leonard allows it to happen." David Remnick New Yorker

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"Like NourbeSe Philip’s overlapping global perspectives, her book as a whole has the structure of a Venn diagram. Insofar as the title is an eponym of the last poem in the book, both title and poem frame the collection, giving it a circular shape from beginning to end." Tyrone Williams • Chicago Review

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"So we have in this small book a complete picture of a human condition brought about by (but perhaps not unique to) a form of bereavement, elegantly and appealingly written, leaving us in no doubt as to its reality and terms of manifestation — you’d think that were enough. But it isn’t, because there is also the poetry, ‘A Part Song’." Peter Riley • Fortnightly Review of Books

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"The Ireland Chair of Poetry, where a poet of national distinction is appointed for three years to a roving professorship, is one of those absolutely daft good things that the powers that be in Irish life come up with now and again." Thomas McCarthy • Dublin Review of Books

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"But it does not take special pleading to say that this book is much more than an archaeology of British poetry and Roy Fisher’s contribution to it. The widespread admiration for Fisher’s writing is undoubtedly because, for over sixty years, Fisher has given his readers an exploration of the world which is not only deeply recognisable, but constantly different and effortlessly enthralling." Ian Pople Manchester Review

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"“I don’t believe in narrative [songs] anymore, life’s not like that. Fractured narrative, time compressed, events stuck on events, or distressing logic is much more real”. Dismissing the prophetic nature of his lyrics, he admits that the anxiety and dread they have always featured can seem as if they foretell “certain events”." Nick Cave TLS

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"If Moore’s borrowings allow for the characterization of her as a modern collage artist, a devil-may-care dialogic experimenter, Elizabeth Bishop had quite a different view. Helping Moore with her translations of La Fontaine, she comes to a sadly astonished awareness of her mentor’s difference from other people, linked to her inability to hear or write verse in conventional ways. It seems that Moore “was possessed of a unique, involuntary sense of rhythm, therefore of meter”; what else would one expect, given that “she looked like no one else” and “talked like no one else,” and that “her poems showed a mind not much like anyone else’s”?" Vidyan Ravinthiran Poetry

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"Writing in English in Asia means writing from the edge, Wong explained: it’s a peripheral vantage that often leaves you gazing across to the UK or US for a wider readership. But he also recounted the writerly pleasure of occupying such an edge – now less a margin than a blade – to create poems postcolonial and queer and triumphantly hard-to-pin-down." Sarah Howe The Poetry Review

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"Claude Péloquin was the bad boy of French-Canadian poetry, known for his stage antics and first published at the age of 19." Pierre-Mathieu Fortin • Red Bull Music Academy

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"When, in ‘Another Part of the Wood’ (with a glance, this time, at As You Like It), Wright does ‘take issue’ with Davie, he does so as the editor of a string of influential anthologies, including The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Verse (with Heath-Stubbs) and the classic Penguin, The Mid-Century: English Poetry 1940–60, and of two significant magazines, Nimbus (1951–58), with Tristram Hull and others, and X: A Quarterly Review (1959–62), with Swift. Despite his impatience with the way in which, in the mid-1970s, ‘the Arts Council and the universities were beginning to rig trampolines for the daring young men on the flying trochees’, Wright speaks with authority as a respected poet and curator of contemporary poetry; not as an outsider, a maverick or sniper, but as an equal, on equal terms." James Keery PN Review

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"We all sat and listened, and the long eighteenth century windows were wide open to the horse chestnut trees in the Mirabelle Palace Gardens behind us, and there was simply nothing to say. He was the Real Thing. (Later, he would buy me a strudel in a pastry shop and I would discover he had absolutely nothing to say, either, once he put the violin down. But that’s another story.)" Fiona Sampson Agenda

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