"You must understand that art is nothing to these men, nor history. The penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred. They have the specious present of the barbarian. Art in this century demands a sense of the tragic dignity of history. These poor bastards are stuck in the last third of the 19th century and I swear they don’t know that anything happened before that." Donald Hall • Paris Review

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"“A BAME critic is far less likely to read such poets as straightforwardly authentic – a favoured construction of white reviewers often”, [Sandeep Parmar] told me when I interviewed her for the website Write Out Loud. “It is tiring and disappointing and sometimes infuriating to see poets of colour read so simplistically, without enough [of the] attention to literariness and aesthetic choices that white poets are afforded.”" Jade Cuttle TLS

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"The question of connection between the writing implements and the writing itself is a fascinating one. Henry James, in the novels he composed after rheumatism in his right wrist forced him to give up handwriting, can undoubtedly be overheard dictating those ever-rolling sentences to his typist. He admitted the effect himself, and noted that he eventually came to depend on the noise made by the machine as background to his creative flow. Francis reminds us that keyboards make demands that are literally digital, and may be painful (“the strain of Q in the little finger”) – at least for anyone aspiring beyond the horribly amateurish, but tempting, two-fingered approach." Carol Rumens Guardian

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"Viewed historically, as poetry written in relation to the spatialised moment of Olson, what The Double Dream of Spring allows us to configure, in our own geographically fraught condition, is a language of space in which movement, not belonging, is the principle of articulation." David Herd • Cordite

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"In a 1983 essay, “Poetry and Ambition,” Mr. Hall began it by saying, “I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.” He went on to assail much of the poetry world, finding mediocrity there, or what he calls the “McPoem.”" NYT on Donald Hall "“None of us knew we would ever publish a book, but we took it very seriously. We would stay up late arguing over whether one poem was good enough to go in our magazine. It was incredibly stimulating. We argued all the time.”" Donald Hall Irish Times "By age 14, he had decided to become a poet, inspired after a conversation with a fellow teen versifier who declared, 'It is my profession.' 'I had never heard anyone speak so thrilling a sentence,' Hall remembered." Daily Mail / Guardian "Hall’s whole-animal approach to writing — leaving no parts unused or wasted — recalls the poem he turned into his most popular children’s book, “Ox-Cart Man,” in which nothing is wasted in a farmer’s repetitive cycle of manufacture and market." Heller McAlpin Washington Post

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"But when Michael Hartnett says “The act of poetry is a rebel act”, readers will often, depending on their politics, mentally head off to the nearest barricade or place a disgusted call to (poetry) Crimestoppers." David Wheatley • Irish Times

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"The troubling possibility that my desire to be a poet had similarly been complicated by a desire to be desired became the catalyst for some poems of mine in which the poet and the muse are engaged in conflicts that take the form of domestic arguments. While these poems are predictably read as autobiographical narratives of home life, the struggle depicted was an internal one. It was also aesthetic: I was beginning to understand that one doesn’t have to write poems that will please anyone, nor does one have to prettify, or even illuminate, one’s ‘self’ in them." Kathryn Maris Poetry London

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"We soon realize interesting contrasts, or rather, interesting asynchronies – in Empire and post-Empire Britain, or a modern Greece that is too often (mis)understood in relation to the classical world, and its inheritance. Some relationships may seem lopsided; the one with Homer going back to Chapman, imports and negotiations of modernist values through Seferis and other poets of his generation." Paschalis Nikolaou • Greek Agenda News

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"It is common practice now in reviews to talk only about ‘the speaker’ of a poem, rather than the poet, but Who is Mary Sue? is so focused on this subject, drawing on so many different sources, that it is a useful milestone in the discussion of authorial selfhood in poems, and particularly in lyric poetry." Chrissy Williams Poetry London

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"Adorno, it seems, is beyond criticism, and indeed “as Adorno says. . .” is an orthodoxy of the current graduate classroom in Anglophone countries, though not at all in his native Germany. If you want to make a sophisticated Marxist intervention in a discussion of how to understand Keston Sutherland’s poetry, invoke the name Adorno! And watch your “questions” become more and more intriguingly “unanswerable.”" Marjorie Perloff Chicago Review

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"Poetry thrives in the digital age because it is “a form of resistance, … an insistence on private truth and fantasy”." Magdalena Kay on Derek Mahon DRB

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"The poet’s back story, as Hollywood would call it, is so affecting it gets in the way. The poetry might develop into something richer and stranger, given a chance; but Vuong’s appetite for pathos; his giddy, off-kilter images; and his painful eagerness suggest how much work he has yet to do." William Logan • New Criterion

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"The transition from poems to novels happened because I’d reached a dead end in poetry. ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ used me up and when I tried to write poems afterwards I felt like a jobbing writer (and there’s no worse crime, in my opinion, than writing something which doesn’t need to be written). So I gave up on the poems and then, suddenly, I was writing a novel. I’ve always wanted to write a novel." Katharine Kilalea Granta

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"Perhaps, as our poets get older, and bodies let them, and us, down, such sequences become more prevalent: Jo Shapcott, Julia Darling and Carol Rumens have written about this from the female point of view. O’Neill, always conscious of his context within a family, writes with the sensitivity we’ve come to expect from him about the effect his own cancer diagnosis has on, not only him, but on those closest to him." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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"Some of Thomas’s most arresting poetry emerges from the clash of his religious and his nationalist impulses. In a small poetic drama, “The Minister,” a young pastor comes to an isolated farm community with dreams of sparking a revival. His idealism is soon dashed: “I began a Bible class; / But no one came / … I opened the Bible and expounded the Word / To the flies and spiders, as Francis preached to the birds.”" Peter J. Leithart • First Things

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"At a moment when arguments rage about poetry’s competing responsibilities to a community and to the solitary dream and vision, [Paula] Meehan reminds us that it is possible to take both sides: proud to have seen the “changed relationship to hierarchical ideas around the canon and who makes it, who shakes it”, she is also clear that “poetry is not sociology, poetry is not history”." John McAuliffe Irish Times

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"Even in Marsden the extraordinary could happen, apparently. Staring out of that window every night I developed a new sense of the world, one that went beyond the factual and the informational. A sense of what it was like, and how it felt. That was the beginning of my life as a writer, even though I still didn’t know how to capture experiences in words." Simon Armitage • Guardian

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"The mystery, then, is how a man who had obviously studied Shakespeare closely, who was alive to the beauty of his poetry, and who was moreover no imbecile could have published such reams of ludicrous doggerel apparently in all seriousness and without any appreciation of the spectacle that he was making of himself. Insofar as he is remembered at all, it is as the McGonagall of Bournemouth; a desultorily active Cumberland Clark Memorial Society sometimes holds a dinner in his memory." Anthony Daniels • New Criterion

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