"It was on a whim that he went to a weekend conference on Turing around the time of his centenary in 2012, and then began reading about philosophy of mind. This was a difficult time for Eaves. He had been arts editor at the TLS for 17 years, where it was a struggle to carve out imaginative space to write fiction. He left in 2011 to teach English and creative writing at the University of Warwick, but though his third novel, the family saga This Is Paradise, and a poetry collection [Sound Houses (Carcanet)] were coming out, he felt that creatively he had “nothing else in the tank at all”." Justine Jordan Guardian

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"There are lyrical touches in essays such as “Rogue Thoughts in Coole Park”, in which [Rita Ann Higgins] writes: “An adjective like blissful was swanning around in my head but I never let it out for fear of shattering the stillness.” There is a sense that the lyrical cannot be indulged in until the problems of the world have been tackled first." Amanda Bell DRB

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"The British reader is reminded, here, of J. H. Prynne’s writing, the exotic, technical language exactly placed, the sense of a precisely visualized scene, both present and also seen slightly out of the corner of one’s layman’s eye. [Forrest] Gander is perhaps different to Prynne in that the title of the sequence, the fact that its sections are named alternately, ‘Entrance’ and ‘Exit’, and the black and white photographs which accompany the poems, all point towards a closely particularised trajectory for the sequence." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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"if the wider tone of his oration was designed to get up the nose of those in the audience, it seems to have worked; I.A. Richards was reported as saying that it would take poetry twelve years to mend the damage that Housman had caused in an hour, an anecdote Housman was pleased to record and repeat." Simon Armitage The Poetry Review

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"There are autobiographical pieces, poems of history and imagination and, in The Great Unburned, there are witches overhead: “Slow at first, over fields and fences, / over the god-fearing steeples we’ll climb, our broomsticks / tight in the grip of our shameless, fantastical thighs.” It is a poem of formidable skill (that “fantastical” perversely and satisfyingly makes the witches real) and written in the hinged form Copus invented (she dubbed it the “specular”). The second half of the poem mirrors the first, and yet the doubling back is not straightforward – the punctuation changes and you lose some italics. You never enter the same poem/ river/ flight path twice." Kate Kellaway Observer

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"Today, with 28 collections to his name, Armitage is part of the national curriculum and his work deeply embedded in the British psyche – as well as carved into the Pennines, where poems appear on six “Stanza Stones” between Marsden and Ilkley. Having produced everything from a translation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to a more recent poetic look at a world in meltdown, The Unaccompanied, he is one of the UK’s bestselling poets." Alison Flood Guardian

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"At sixteen, waiting out a bomb scare at her high school while next to a display of dissected insects, Souvankham Thammavongsa wrote a poem called “Frogs.” She treated the poem as if it would be her last. “I didn’t want to go out without it being my choice—or at least without an argument,” she said in an interview. “I was angry.”" Anita Lahey • The Walrus

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"I had been a nun for almost 20 years and was facing both my 40th birthday and a major life decision when I first encountered Bishop’s poetry in my doctoral program at George Washington University in DC." Patricia Dwyer • Lit Hub

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"Murray struck against what he called the “imperial trap of exclusion”. He wrote within a tradition defined by the Scottish writers Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean (he had a strong poetic and ancestral link to Scotland); by Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers; by a host of poets he celebrated in essays and tributes. Only, not the Anglo-American modernists. His impatience with Ezra Pound and TS Eliot was unwobbling." Michael Schmidt Guardian

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"What we now have here is the collected poetry of a singular and driven voice. A poet who travelled widely both literally and imaginatively into some of the most difficult corners of the late twentieth century world; from Wormwood Scrubs prison, to the moors of his northern England, from Amish Pennsylvania to ‘a Sarajevo bread queue’. Part of Smith’s drive is to inhabit these places as nakedly and fully as he possibly could, and to write as clearly and unsparingly as he could about that inhabiting. Sometimes, therefore, he can remind the reader of an entirely different poet, someone like Keith Douglas, a poet whose voice and writing seems of another kind to that of his contemporaries. This book shows how hugely successful Smith was as a poet, and what a resource he provides for those writing in his wake." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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