"The reading, he tells us, is a form of “poor theatre”: its lack of resources is important to what it does. In general, poetry readings are not like opera. Nobody takes our tickets and shows us to our seats, there’s no orchestra, no curtains, no lights." Ailbhe Darcy The Critical Flame

---

"If one is not from a dominant group, the question of identity can’t be taken for granted; even if one wants to shunt it aside and write of other things, one often feels compelled to make a case for doing so." Robert Archambeau Hudson Review

---

"Overdue apologies to all those who thought Brick must be an acronym: Book Review . . . Nope." Stan Dragland Brick

---

"Zagajewski’s primal tristesse cannot be confined to Lvov or any other locale. It reaches around the world, embracing his eventual emigration to Paris, his sojourns in Berlin and the United States, and finally Kraków, the literary heart of an “exceptionally polemical, and often petty, country.”" Cynthia Haven • Weekly Standard

---

"The names he used to sign his letters convey a similar breadth of interests: Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve (from an American radio sitcom of the forties and fifties); Mrs Harold Chillywater (from Ronald Firbank); Oriane de Guermantes; Boob McNutt (a 1930s comic strip character); Fleda Vetch (heroine of Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton); Sybil Fawlty; Pastor Fido (from an opera by Handel); The Countess Gruffanuff (from a Thackeray fairytale); Wackford Squeers and Mrs Fezziwig and Miss Havisham; Miss Turnstiles (from the 1949 movie On the Town); Dagwood Bumstead (from the comic strip Blondie); Diggory Venn (from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native); Adinolfa, Carmichael, Bob Boucharessas (from Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique); Marjory Frobisher (from To the Manor Born); The Sea Hag (from Popeye); Puzzled in Pomona; Captain Peacock, Mr Grainger, Cuthbert Rumbold and Young Mr Grace (from Are You Being Served?). Like these characters, John seemed indestructible. I am still finding it hard to believe I have no more of his witty, elegant, erudite, goofy, gossipy, supremely entertaining letters to look forward to – and then to answer as best I could." Mark Ford PN Review

---

"It was after a December 1963 ocean crossing, nine days in rough weather, that Schifano showed up in New York with his model/art student girlfriend Anita Pallenberg—later the companion of the Rolling Stones’s Brian Jones, until she paired off with bandmate Keith Richards instead—and found a studio sublet at 791 Broadway, where O’Hara and his partner LeSueur were among the neighbors." Barry Schwabsky • NYRB

---

"I’m not one of these poets who write about how their parents met, or their grandmother’s story, or about my own life." Jane Yeh • The Poetry Extension

---

"If, as Logan writes later in the same poem, “There was an hour when style was not the cause,” what I have been describing did not occur at such an hour: if this is a failure, it is wholly the result of style." Jack Hanson • Kenyon Review

---

"Blood may be the physical image that connects all types of violence in Don’t Call Us Dead, but it is also the route to commemoration and love." Sandeep Parmar • Guardian

---

"I remember, especially, his tug of war with the journalist Matías del Río. Nicanor had agreed to talk to him on the condition that there be no questions or recordings, but del Río took two minutes to break the rules. “You, sir, are a pontificator, and pontiffs belong in Rome,” Nicanor said, suddenly, and walked out without a word." Alejandro Zambra • New Yorker

---

"The poem’s cast of female characters — princesses, queens, slaves, goddesses — along with its vagueness on the technical details of sailing and war, led Samuel Butler to propose, in his brilliant if zany 1887 book The Authoress of the Odyssey, that the epic was written by a woman." A.E. Stallings • Spectator

---

"[W]ith this one book, Crase established an immediate place in contemporary American poetry, which was followed by almost complete silence. If you want to obtain The Revisionist now, you are going to have to pay a lot of money for second hand copies and even more for new ones, as this major book has been out of print for a very long time. In a note which accompanies the poems, Crase himself seems to suggest that the pieces in The Astropastorals come from a period between 1979, before the publication of The Revisionist, and the year 2000. If that is the case, then somewhere a major American voice has lost its way. And a major book is, unconscionably, out of print." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

---

"In his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge describes a ‘rotting sea’ full of ‘slimy things.’" Jessica Sequeira • Berfrois

---

"Any such anthology as this is bound to involve several endlessly controversial trade-offs, but there can only be unqualified approval for the contextual materials, in the form of short introductory essays, notes and glosses, that greatly assist the reader to make both local and overall sense of what could otherwise be a bewilderingly vast and pathless expanse of text. And a brief word in conclusion about one of the two hugely industrious editors. Now approaching his eightieth birthday, Meic Stephens has for half a century been one of the most imposing figures on the Welsh cultural scene. A fine poet and prodigious compiler –for instance of The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales – Stephens it was who made possible the thriving Welsh book industry of today thanks to his seminal investment in infrastructure during his culturally transformative years of service as Director of Literature at the Welsh Arts Council." M Wynn Thomas PN Review

---

"Anybody with an interest in poetry should be reading Leontia Flynn." Kate Kellaway • Guardian

---

"In Britain we like to point the finger at America for its record on racism. It is only when writers such as Hirsch and Reni Eddo-Lodge are given a platform that we are forced to confront how it plays out on home ground." Bernardine Evaristo TLS

---

""A big one." It’s a phrase you’ll come across several times in reading Allen Curnow. It could be a fish caught off Kare Kare, a talent another writer didn’t have, an implied assessment of his own." Vincent O'Sullivan • The Spinoff

---

"If at times I felt too much moderation in the stack of books I was reading through, a too predictable decorum, and could have wished for a clunk, a barbaric yawp or two, even a bit of show-offy artifice, still I liked the understanding that not everything has to be a monument, or to aim at greatness — though there were many great things in these books. I liked tremendously the sense that, rather than a specialized event, poetry can be, simply, a way of living." Daisy Fried Poetry

---

"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

---

"I too was a young desperado of a critic, right up to my first (and wholly deserved) death threat, after which I decided that this was not the career for a coward with such a fundamentally lousy attitude." Don Paterson • Guardian

---

"He was a poet who could get away with putting the words ‘rupestral concentricity’ in a poem, but who also refused to spare himself: ‘how selfishly you serve your own heart’s bent.’ Scarcely anything, now, remains uncontaminated by the shabby depredations of the age, with its drive to monetise, to commodify; not even poetry. In a time when so many important questions are negligently left unasked, Richard Murphy’s work continues both to pose these questions and to answer them." Caitriona O'Reilly Irish Times

---