"Rhyme and meter are natural features of language. But of course in natural speech the rhymes are mostly imperfect, and they occur at irregular intervals. And in natural speech the meter keeps varying too, like the grain of wood or the texture of a forest. That’s the kind of rhyme and meter that appeals to me most. The enchanted forest is really a forest; it isn’t an orchard." Robert Bringhurst • Manchester Review

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"While few poets write with such soaring richness as [Kaveh] Akbar, few are as scatterbrained." John Ebersole • Tourniquet Review

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"What was Moore’s verbal trapeze work like, then? She was a genius metaphor-maker to begin with, but it was her daring use of form that drew gasps." Ange Mlinko • Poetry

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"My Twitter feed is full of writers and critics who relentlessly strive to be up on their field, logging every literary debut like librarians, returning from writing conferences with shareable jpegs of their book-engorged tote bags, or lighting out for yet another reading, the stacks on the book table like some mountain range, the promise of a horizon." Jason Guriel • The Walrus

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"This both was and was not a regular Mass, for at the door the poet’s nephew Andrew Montague handed out a printed order of service that included a selection of Montague’s poems, particularly ones about Garvaghey, his neighbours (Like Dolmens Round My Childhood), a mountain spring, the penal rock in Altamuskin, Lynch’s meadow, and First Landscape, First Death, which states his wishes for the burial of his body." Adrian Frazier Irish Times

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"i don’t think i have any idea of my own voice. perhaps this is a question for a reader to answer?" Anne Carson • Quarterly Conversation

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"The Queen will present Muldoon with his medal in 2018." PA Guardian

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"The actual Jerusalem is rather different, of course—a city riven by sectarian conflict, coarsened by tourism, marred by the building of settlements and walls, and by the scars of occupation. This discrepancy between ideal and reality is the premise of Adonis’s poem, in which the heavenly archetype hovers like a mirage above the degraded modern city." Robyn Cresswell • New Yorker

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"Throughout House of Lords and Commons, an expansive, elastic line balances a compression of complex and vivid images. " Sandeep Parmar • Guardian "The House of Lord and Commons, like many first and second collections, is a reckoning on two levels: one, with the landscapes of childhood and adolescence in poems that attempt to speak with, and put the dead to rest, in the pursuit of a life and identity the speaker can call their own; the second, a reckoning with language – mining influence, as they did with memory, for what will become their own voice: a place, as Heaney said, ‘where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew’." Chad Campbell • The Manchester Review

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"“The anecdote,” said the poet Anne Boyer, when I met her for the first time in the flesh and not on Twitter, in 2016, “resists authority.” Until late 2016, there were no anecdotes about Elena Ferrante, only about readers’ experiences of accounting for Elena Ferrante, including guesses as to her age, sex, nationality, inheritance, hierarchy, and familial and professional relations." Joanna Walsh LARB

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"Don Coles, who died last week at ninety, took a long time over his writing—he was forty-seven when his first book of poems appeared. That legendary patience not only played a role in his becoming one of Canada’s best poets, but if the art form in this country is as vibrant, accomplished, and celebrated as it’s ever been, it’s in good part due to the example he provided to generations of younger writers." Richard Sanger • The Walrus

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"What interests me about poetry as a medium is that it tends to make reality – that we in many ways oversimplify in order to survive it – as complex as it needs to be again, as filled with contradiction as it needs to be." Jorie Graham • Guardian

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"God, how people smoked in 1981—Joseph with his L&M’s (“Wystan smoked these”), Derek with filterless Pall Malls, Seamus with his Dunhills." Sven Birkerts • Bookhaven

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"A poet should be wary of goading poems toward vision or grace. Longley writes of a little girl who has just played the Virgin Mary, probably in a school pageant, “You . . . carry home the spongeware bowl/ Very carefully, still unbroken/ After birth-pangs and stage-fright and/ Large enough to hold the whole world.” The world would have been bad enough; the whole world seems the work of a door-to-door salesman." William Logan • The New Criterion

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"This, as I see it, is because of a pervasive insecurity about the status of poetry in our culture. On the one hand, between large and small independent publishing houses, the U.S. publishes thousands of new books of poetry every year, and where a generation ago there was just one poetry book contest in America, now there are over 300, according to a 2010 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And it’s estimated that less than seven percent of Americans even read poetry. Publishing houses accept as a rule that they will almost always take a loss on a publication of a book of poetry." Sarah V. Schweig • Public Seminar

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"People disagree on what they like, of course," said lead author Amy Belfi, a psychologist at Missouri University of Science and Technology. "[But] it seems there are certain factors that consistently influence how much a poem will be enjoyed." Tom Jacobs • Pacific Standard

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"Without question, Merwin is America’s most important living poet.” Dean Rader • San Francisco Chronicle

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