"A language of reviewing which might reach for phrases such as ‘beautifully controlled’, ‘body of work’, and a general slew of self-gratifying slippage between the verbal and the corporeal, is inadequate to Kingdom of Gravity." Vahni Capildeo on Nick Makoha The Compass

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"Which is to say, I don’t think I had any grasp of the staggering range and history of British writing, apart from who made headlines or got attention in the United States because of awards or notoriety or big reviews. Zadie Smith and Simon Armitage are the only two names that immediately come to mind as I try to recall who I had heard of prior to arriving in London." R.A. Villanueva • Oxford Poetry

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"Osip Mandelstam’s life and work are seamlessly united; his speeches and deeds form a singular impression of wholeness, of joyful integrity and inner freedom. “Everything has become heavier and more massive,” he wrote in his essay “On the Nature of the Word”; “thus man must become harder . . . the sacred character of poetry arises out of the conviction that man is harder than everything else in the world.” Osip demonstrated his own adamantine hardness—the “deep bedrock of principles,” in Nadezhda’s words, “which set him apart from anyone of his own or later generations”—when he meddled, on pain of death, in the case of an imprisoned art historian; when he intervened to save five old men facing execution, sending Bukharin a volume of his poetry with an inscription to the effect that “every word here is against what you are going to do”; and especially when, taking the measure of a Goliath like no other the world has ever seen, he weighed little stones of poetry—dense verses of formal power, earthy thematic richness, and striking imagery—against the immense totality of the USSR." Jacob Howland New Criterion

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"I'm not sure where or when he gave his first poetry reading but he was no less nervous. Afraid that, if he took the time to read slowly and pause occasionally, he'd lose the audience, he rushed. He didn't want to sound too actorish, too Dylan Thomasy. He didn't like his voice, too high and thin; his accent, too English. It was a wonder, then, to witness the Extreme Makeover: he got to be so good! His voice was high and thin but its limitations allowed him to dramatize just enough." Mike Kitay Threepenny Review

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"The long eponymous poem is a masterful depiction of motherhood during the Troubles as a perpetually heightened state of vigilance and vulnerability. The quiet “rhythms of a culchie life” on the farm are disturbed suddenly and repeatedly by the jarring words broadcast on the radio, which seems to come alive in the poem’s opening: “The radio hoots and mutters, hoots and mutters / out of the dark, each morning of my childhood.”" Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado DRB

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"“I am ashamed to say I do not understand the poem clearly,” my student wrote. When I write back to her, I offer explanations about confusing lines and send her articles on Modernism and symbolism and World War I, but I also tell her there is no need to feel ashamed." Emily Frisella • The Rumpus

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"Much of Zagajewski’s mulling takes place on his long walks around the city. He shares his bibliography for walking, recommending Italian poet Eugenio Montale, Greek diplomat and poet George Seferis, the Czech poet Vladimir Holan. One can almost hear his Polish-accented drawl as he writes, “And so we live, torn between brief explosions of meaning and patient wandering through the plains of ordinary days.”" Cynthia Haven Weekly Standard

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"In part three of the poem, (Sarah) Arvio comes up with an interesting solution when she translates the fifth line as “I have seen the gray rain chase the waves” (Kinnell translates this as “I’ve seen gray rains fleeing toward the sea” and Spender and Gili’s version is “I have seen grey showers move towards the waves”). Arvio’s single-syllable words suggest panic; in the meter, it sounds like a good line of English poetry—T.S. Eliot might have been proud of it—rather than a translation. Since both the rain and the waves are in movement, “chase” serves to emphasize this and suggests also that something urgent is at stake, even if in the original Spanish the rain is running away from something as well as running toward the sea." Colm Toibin NYRB

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"Whitman, long recognized for his candid treatment of the body and sexuality, was also the quintessential poet of disability and death. As a volunteer nurse in the Civil War hospitals in Washington, D.C., he visited, according to his own estimate, between 80,000 and 100,000 wounded or sick soldiers over the course of four years." David S. Reynolds • NYRB

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"People presume there is a lot of structure in this structure because I think some of the best poetry I have ever read, it goes beyond the bounds of standard grammar. But when you know the grammar really well you can utilise what you like to get the message across." Joe Schmidt Irish Times

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"In the far future, when the only readers who cherish and puzzle over Lucie Brock-Broido’s poems are those who never met her, those readers will surely try to imagine what she must have been like in person." Stephanie Burt • Paris Review

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"The last time I saw Lucie was at the Star Market in Porter Square. She had called me a few weeks earlier to say she had a brain tumor and was dying. She said it in the same way as she had said many things over the last thirty-plus years, with characteristic theatricality." Askold Melnyczuk • Agni

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"There are so many models of lyric – Allen Grossman and Susan Stewart beautifully and differently elaborate it – that consider lyric as responsiveness. Grossman has a scary, incisive model of Orphic vs. Philomelan origins of poetic power, Stewart an account of ‘lyric possession’. All these seem terribly resonant and extremely complex to me – accounts of ways we call, and are called, into being, speech, silence. But I also think of any lyric as implicitly choral, or as emerging out of some subliminal sociable chorus, some matrix we all swim in and sometimes ‘speak’ or ‘sing’ from." Maureen N McLane Granta

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"The narrative tone of a Tom French poem is immediately recognisable: detached but sympathetic; sensuously nostalgic; watchful; alert to the serendipities of time, place, and logos; acutely aware of the local with its twin taproots in history and landscape." Caitriona O'Reilly Irish Times

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"Coming soon after he began teaching at Harvard and was hearing the “unmoored speech” of some contemporary American poetry, the commission would also be a way of ensuring that his “linguistic anchor” stayed “lodged on the Anglo-Saxon sea-floor”." Andrew McCulloch TLS

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"[T]hroughout his career, Gunn wrote against the grain of Confessional poetry. It is as though his poetry depended on him treating himself as someone else, or nobody in particular, someone almost anonymous. Gunn never claimed the Orphic privileges of the ‘Poet’ or a ‘Poet’s Life’ like Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath. He was content to operate within the republic of contingency." Kit Fan The Poetry Review

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"Samuel Lee is part of a new generation of Singapore poets published by the influential Math Paper Press who are forced to navigate the authoritarian city-state’s strict censorship constraints. In her 2016 essay ‘Chapter and Verse’, Math Paper Press poet Amanda Chong explains poetry’s role in a city with ‘growing feelings of dislocation, a widening income gap and limited historical consciousness’. ‘Singaporeans have an affinity for obliqueness, eschewing direct confrontation for more coded expressions,’ Chong writes. ‘Poetry is seen as the ivory tower of the intelligentsia, its messages safely elevated from the masses. This has created space for narratives that contest State orthodoxy.’" Natasha Stallard The Manchester Review

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"The collection What Are Years (1941) seems to be the last book of Moore’s height as a modernist, the last book to include long poems of excitingly varied yet symmetrical syllabic stanzas, across which the associative hypotactic turnings of her exacting mind were woven." Christopher J Adamson Boston Review

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"There is a feeling, in Gunn, that sinuosities of syntax, given the scaffold of rhyme, and proved upon the pulse of meter, cannot fail in the quest for complexity; he has a habit of relentlessly finessing a perception until the rhymes begin to self-generate, and the metaphysical contortions produced as a result are mannered, not cognitive. Rococo, not rational, though Gunn’s no-nonsense aesthetic — he was hard on poets like James Wright, for writing disconnectedly — packages these flourishes as a strict logic." Vidyan Ravinthiran Poetry

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"Translation, like any work of reporting or reading or interpreting or narrating, isn’t like that. I think we should aim not to be “unbiased,” but to be responsible, and that involves being as conscious as possible about our biases and preferences, as well as being informed as possible about the material at hand (which includes our society and the English language, as well as the Greek text)." Emily Wilson • Chicago Review of Books

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"Graves, Mac Neice, Longley, and the poets whom Longley appreciates regard middle-class educated conversation as the decent norm, fit to maintain the middle C of poetry while allowing for local extravagance, demotic or sublime. This is evidently what Longley means by “the true tradition”. No wonder his sole mention of Eliot is to say that The Hollow Men is “pretentious tosh”. " Denis Donoghue Irish Times

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