"Art itself, including by implication, poetry, becomes a kind of ‘naming’ or ‘possession-ing’, a re-visioning of things. To delineate and describe is to ‘make known something.’" Ken Evans on Tom French Manchester Review

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"The critic Kenneth Tynan had a sign on his desk that read: “Be light, stinging, insolent, and melancholy.” These seem to be Mr. Muldoon’s rules as well." Dwight Garner NYT "Few poets can write history into the margins of their work without being overwhelmed by it. In this book’s short lyrics and astonishing long poems, Muldoon manages." John McAuliffe Irish Times

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"On the page, British Surrealism feels less committed than its European antecedents. It’s more jokey, for a start, and diluted. In the poems and drawings gathered in Thirteenth Stroke, Andre Breton’s highly sexed muses have mostly been banished and replaced with something closer to a vaudeville show or puppet theatre. (To many present-day readers this will come as a relief rather than a disappointment.)" Gregory O'Brien PN Review

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"There is also a willingness to admit that much about Blake’s work remains perplexing and irreducible to simple interpretation. “Trying to Understand the Long Poems” is a disarmingly honest section heading, while some chapters end not with conclusions but with strings of further questions." James Ward DRB

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"From the art criticism of Walter Pater to the reviews by Eileen Myles, the particular tenets of taste—works reclaimed, schools or movements endorsed, new authors celebrated—finally matter less than the critic’s attitude, or what was once called “sensibility.” With criticism, it’s best to reverse D.H. Lawrence’s famous motto: Trust the teller, not the tale." Nicholas Dames The Nation

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"Brodsky was another Osya, or Iosef, or Joseph, who like the original Joseph of Genesis was tossed into a pit by his brethren, and just as Joseph did in Egypt, he finally won recognition outside of his native Canaan, outside his own land. " Hamid Ismailov • The Critical Flame

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"Leonard Cohen was the poet laureate of the lack, the psalmist of the privation, who made imperfection gorgeous." Leon Wieseltier NYT "Leonard belonged to a rare category of writer insofar as his collected songs and his poems were indivisible. I have no hesitation in saying he was one of the great poets of the era." Paul Muldoon Guardian

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"Poetry is not useful, and it is in every culture. Not only is it not endangered, it will outlast any number of species of living things on the face of the earth. It will only perish with our own. I worry about journalism. I don’t worry about Poetry." A.E. Stallings • TLS

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"Bunting’s response was to re-tailor his life in accordance with the maxim he had adopted for poetry, “Dichten=condensare”. He bought a six-ton sailing boat and spent a year “harpooning congers and netting herring” off the south coast of England in a kind of maritime reprise of the life evoked in “Chomei at Toyama”; then hawked his seafaring skills around New York and Los Angeles before enlisting in the RAF at the outbreak of the Second World War." Mark Hutchinson• TLS

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"Eurydice’s elegant dismissal of Orpheus mirrors H.D.’s dismissal of Orpheus as the mythopoetic icon." Dean Rader • Ploughshares

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"The majority of the contemporary poetry industry, insofar as it has a business model, is based on extracting money from writers, not giving it to them. Every year, I have to work harder to make a comparable living." Clare Pollard Poetry Spotlight

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