The Page
poetry, essays, ideas
"On both sides of the “noble amateur” debate, if that’s what this is, there is, of course, fault to be found, but also virtue: as above, Watts has been accused of sour grapes and everything else, whereas, even if her views seem incorrect, she might just as well be admired for intellectual honesty, as McNish is, and for defying the popular way of thinking." Michael Caines • TLS

"Instapoetry, the so-named slips of inspoverse that have propagated on Instagram like the common cold over the past few years, is a boutique of perfectly curated objets de commerce—“Raised lettering, pale nimbus. White,” American Psycho’s ideal business card gone digital—selling a sanitized unreality." Soraya Roberts • The Baffler

"When Richard Wilbur died in October at 96, he left behind a body of work that rivals that of the great modernists." Christian Wiman • New York Times

"In one short poem [Ahren] Warner compares his beloved to a kitten, a porpoise, a dormouse, and a camelid." Paul Batchelor • New Statesman

"In 2015 I heard McNish speak on a panel at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, where she was also a main performer. Two things she said struck me then as bizarre, both in themselves and for the fact that she chose to admit them publicly. The first was that her publisher (presumably by then Picador) had sent her a pile of books to read, because they thought she hadn’t read enough poetry. The second was that the poems she was writing presently were the same as the poems she had written in her childhood diaries." Rebecca Watts • PN Review

"Well, my favorite poem is “The Flea” by John Donne. I would have liked to have written “The Flea.”" Paul Muldoon • LARB

"Increasingly in our aggressively nationalist times, inwardness is thought of as high virtue; insularity and stubbornness of vision are promoted as signs of a courageous up-holding of supposedly threatened heritage and values." Christodoulos Makris • Versopolis

"It is wonderful for criticism to be generous to its readers, but is it best for lyric poetry?”" Alibhe Darcy • B O D Y

"Szymborska, on the other hand, loathed the attention thrust upon her. She didn’t like talking about herself or her work, and moreover, as Janusz R. Kowalczyk puts it, “Szymborska did not enjoy ostentation or celebrations—being declared the Nobel laureate was considered ‘the Stockholm tragedy’ by her friends, as it forced her to give more interviews in a month than she had faced in her life.”" Jonathan Russell Clark • Lit Hub

"It is also Aeschylus that forms the link to Balmer’s second book, The Paths of Survival, a larger, less personal enterprise – “larger” in that it covers more than 2,000 years in the history of Aeschylus’s lost play, Myrmidons. Very little of Aeschylus survives at all and only tiny fragments of Myrmidons remain as preserved, quoted or referred to over time. In this sense it represents all lost texts, all destructions by fire, fury, theft, or neglect." George Szirtes • New Statesman

"Plath’s early poetry, the stuff she wrote at Smith and had published in Harper’s, was awful. Written under the burdensome influence of Dylan Thomas, it was, as Thomas could occasionally be, showy and aimless. (“Go get the goodly squab in gold-lobed corn / And pluck the droll flecked quail where thick they lie.”)" Anwen Crawford • New Yorker

"Not everyone was blown away by the book. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the physicist-satirist of Göttingen, was no more enthusiastic about the novella than he was to be about Goethe’s scientific efforts: “I think the smell of a pancake is a better motive for staying in this world than all young Werther’s ponderous reasons for leaving it.” I must myself confess a congenital antipathy to Goethe’s novels. The characters seem to swim about in a glaucous haze like electronically controlled fish." Ferdinand Mount • NYRB

"I have needed all the genres I have used, and, as a sort of common denominator, I have been the same person with the same concerns from one genre to another." Wendell Berry • Library of America


"We can choose to ignore the noise of other people’s certainties with a close-minded conviction in attending to our own; we can rig up a contraption of agreement and say we all see it one way, pretending that there is not enough discrepancy in the small print of our subjectivities to prove this a lie, or we can simply admit that Truth in the Universe Knowable to Humankind is really a great diversification of certainties, crystallising endlessly away from a mythical absolute.” This makes sense." Jack Underwood • Poetry Review

"On the liner notes to his 1964 album, The Times They Are a-Changin’, Dylan told us that he wrote “with the sounds of François Villon echoin’ through my mad streets.” This makes sense." Allen Barra • The Daily Beast



New poems

Evan Jones The Manchester Review

Gerard Fanning The Manchester Review

Tiana Clark Rattle

Sebastian Agudelo The Manchester Review

Paul Otremba Scoundrel Time

Rachel Custer American Journal of Poetry



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The Page is edited by John McAuliffe, Vincenz Serrano and, since September 2013, Evan Jones at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. It was founded in October 2004 by Andrew Johnston, who edited it until October 2009.
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