"The world could come to Bunyah, New South Wales, as he went out and read his poems to an international audience. A traveller who could bring a “bat’s ultrasound” right into the room (via his poem of that name), Les had one of the most fervent and avid intellects I have encountered. Although university educated, he was a fierce autodidact, whose facility for foreign languages informed the etymological plays and departures of his poetry." John Kinsella Guardian "Les Murray, celebrated Australian writer and Carcanet poet, has passed away at the age of 80. We have published his work for well over 30 years, and he was a true friend of Carcanet." Carcanet

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"He effectively sets the tone of emergency with an essay on Scott Timberg’s lament Culture Crash: The killing of the creative class. The numbers are indeed dismal. Eighty per cent of American newspaper and magazine cultural critics have been fired in the twenty-first century. This is partly what Giraldi means when he says the danger is real. The material conditions that created our inherited idea of a thriving literary culture – that is, the mid-twentieth-century idea – are vanishing." Michael LaPointe TLS

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"Sometimes, when it is time for them to go out again, they don’t wish to leave. Eddie, the youngest and largest at eighteen months old, will reluctantly sit on a glove and let me take him back out to the aviary, but Charlie and Max, more than four years old, don’t like the glove. So, I point at the open door, I tell them “bedtime” and stroke their tailfeathers. This is their signal to go." Frieda Hughes TLS

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"[T]he only part of the AWP conference worth attending is the part that is not the AWP conference." Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr • Jacket2

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"Stanley Plumly, a poet and University of Maryland professor who served as the state’s poet laureate for nine years and also published well-regarded nonfiction studies on literary and artistic subjects, died April 11 at his home in Frederick, Md. He was 79." Matt Schudel • Washington Post

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"It’s as though Minnis’s newest work is accidentally political, just as her early work was accidentally feminist." Sandra Simonds Poetry

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"I like to look at the words in a poem I’m translating as if they were objects: specifically, objects on display in a market stall in a foreign country." Annie Muir LAFF

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"Formal poetry, narrative verse, satirical verse or light verse, dramatic verse—all these options have, with a few exceptions, largely vanished from mainstream poetry. Poems now are almost exclusively concerned with the feelings of a speaker who appears to be, at most, a slightly distanced version of the poet." Brooke Clark • The Walrus

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"The business of poetry is remarkably good at devaluing the art of poetry.”" Jonathan Ebersole • Tourniquet Review

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"From the intertwining anecdotes of the etymological, historical, botanical and political, [CD] Wright’s germinal thesis branches out with a bold statement that “minus the expectations, trees and humans do manifest a common gestalt.” What is it? In a typically learned and wide-ranging reference, Wright enlists Simone Weil to explain: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”" Carol Muske-Dukes NYT

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"In a country prone to disaster and rife with atrocity, the Filipino poet, myself included, responds to disaster or atrocity by writing poetry about it. In some instances, the magnitude of the death toll, or the extent of the violence, can drive a poet to mobilize other poets to write more poems, to post the poems on social media to reach a wider audience, perhaps put together an anthology, perhaps donate the sales from the anthology to the victims. Such gestures seem to restate even as they conceal the division between aesthetics and politics. There is something amiss in collective action when all that comes out of it is more poetry." Conchitina Cruz • Bloomsbury

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"The gorge was the secondary location for the Games. There was hunting with eagles, bone tossing, horseback archery and dog racing, contests for singing and weaving, oral narration. One event was simply called “honouring a grandmother”. The quickest way between events was to take a horse. It was easy to feel at home in this faux-medieval world. Loudspeakers hidden in wooden towers intermittently played epic movie-soundtrack music. Hungarian archers wandered about looking for a place to charge their phones. A couple of Saudi falconers sat on the ground, drinking coffee. Yaks grazed behind them. Tall Kyrgyz wolf-hunting dogs were led to their starting traps for a race. Golden eagles slept, tied to a post or resting on the back of a stationary horse. As night fell, wedding parties started up, complete with feasting and dancing. Over the five-day festival, more than twenty marriage ceremonies were held in Kyrchyn gorge." Peter Frederick Matthews TLS

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"The cry instances and surpasses Eliot’s formulation in ‘Marina’ – “Living to live in a world of time beyond me” – for Seferis makes time and self into something beyond, and that beyond is, again, the marvellous real. Because the poet finally is not interested in documentation but exaltation." Ishion Hutchinson on George Seferis The Poetry Review

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"Paul Klee said that ‘[a]rt does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible’. Murray may have written about ‘inlocked worlds’ and ‘inlocked hands’, of an anchorite living in an irreversible reclusory complete with a walled-up door, but she continually pushed against those boundaries and limitations, against the unknown. It is little wonder, then, that in Murray’s world the body becomes the landscape, something more substantially durable and enduring. ‘It is a bit worrying that I so rarely feel even a momentary belonging’, she confides in Auden. While Yeats talked about poetry as the thinking of the body, there is also a sense of what Emerson called ‘alienated majesty’ in Murray’s writing, suffused as it is with veils and sphinxes, hieroglyphs and symbols, seals and bones, something Delphic, distinguished, mysterious, that needs deciphering: ‘An illusion of dream veils the symbol of the symbol, / Puts its seal upon the head, a birthmark to the bone.’" Jena Schmitt on Joan Murray PN Review

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"Thus, one way into Koethe’s writing is the sense that it is discursive; that it explores issues verbally. In Koethe’s case this means, to some extent, moving away from description to an exploration of, particularly, relationships, emotions, inner states. Koethe, himself, in his book of essays on poetry, Poetry at One Remove, published in 2000, comments, ‘an overly narrow view of [poetry’s] range and possibilities, one that insists on the concrete and particular and proscribes the abstract and discursive … strikes me as pernicious…’" Ian Pople Manchester Review

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"What went unmentioned was the pile of seventeen steamer trunks, each bound in twine with sealed knots, lying between two basement elevators. These mysterious, unlabeled trunks were surrounded by the fog of forbidden knowledge that gathers about the surviving blocks of Plato’s Academy and the ruins of the ruins of Palmyra. At last I had the courage to ask. They contained Ezra Pound’s papers, awaiting the end of a lawsuit over ownership.”" Willian Logan • The New Criterion

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"Discover, omit, place, genuine, imaginary, garden, real, toads, poetry, reading, contempt. I write these terms on the board and we turn them over in our mouths and minds. We mix and match. We play. We discover. We omit." Jacquelyn Ardam • LARB

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