"Still Life (Gallery), the book he finished before his death this October, was another departure. The poems take their cue from paintings – by Poussin, Angela Hackett, Gerard Dillon and Yves Klein – which he describes lovingly, before they become occasions for speculation and memory: where did he first see the paintings, and with who? What has brought them to mind now, as he makes his mundane way around the house or to the hospital for check-ups? Slowly, in long, long lines, each image, each poem, opens up like a Japanese paper flower in water." John McAuliffe and Martina Evans Irish Times

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"Kaur has used her own tools—her phone, her body and face (it doesn’t hurt that Kaur is strikingly beautiful), her sketches—to dismantle the master’s house: Many American readers consider a young woman of color our most prominent poet. Even if I think they’re wrong, it’s hard not to be thrilled by this fact." Rumaan Alam • New Republic

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"If I can claim a footnote in literary history it may be that I cajoled Ciaran into writing prose books." Neil Belton Irish Times

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"I admire Lerner’s analysis, but I would like to start rather lower down on the intellectual scale. If we want to think about how poetry in general is regarded by a wide public, we might start by asking, how do we recognise a poem?" Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Irish Times

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"If ‘Madoc’ were a novel, I wouldn’t persevere with it. But, as I have said, Muldoon doesn’t set problems. It is more that the poem is too full of solutions: no body, no motive, but stacks of clues – what to do with all the recurring figures, the CRO-riddle, Bucephalus the (s)talking horse, the white (shaggy?) dog, the valise that survives into the SF future, the polygraph. Any one of them might lead to the heart of the matter." Michael Hofmann LRB (1990)

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"You don’t have to give up the people you already love—as Frozen 2 rightly says—to leave home and find more. You don’t have to lose yourself, your community, or your existing family, in order to figure out who you are." Stephanie Burt • Pangyrus

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"The life of the poet is always a summons to try to set down some truth that was once true and will go on being true. No poet should have to worry about the public respect or the lack of it in which this art is held." Eavan Boland Poetry Ireland Review

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"“They were arranged, hectored, and re-arranged,” Bishop wrote. “Miss Moore’s hat was considered too big: she refused to remove it.” (“I wish I had worn a minimal hat like yours,” she told Bishop on their taxi ride to Brooklyn later that evening.)" Erwin R. Tiongson • Slate

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"Any poet’s career is likely to involve the discovery (willed or not) of new themes, but the old ones tend to hang on, never finally dealt with.
This is partly the consequence of the poetic culture. We inherit too much in literary terms, and it is too various, bears the signs of much handling before our fingers get near it. I don’t expect the engineer finds herself downstairs at three in the morning trying to re-draw her diagrams which looked quite satisfactory at three in the afternoon. For the poet, the shifting about of allusion and reminiscence seems never to finish, and the places one has visited in the past can suddenly reappear with all their allure but from a new perspective." Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin DRB

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"Many of the poets mentioned here have yet to release a full collection, Hewitt included; others, such as Ostashevsky, Naffis-Sahely and Stern Zisquit, already have more established reputations. The Michael Marks Awards have played a central role in the increased popularity and prestige of the poetry pamphlet in recent years: today it is taken up as often by titan as by tyro." Camille Ralphs TLS

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"Clearly, this is not a dry-as-dust exegesis or a bare-bones student’s guide. Schmidt looks at the text as living literature and his enthusiasm is infectious, suggesting that the reader may discover here archetypes anticipating Kerouac’s On the Road, the various descents to hell of Homer, Virgil and Dante, the flood in Genesis, perhaps even Ballard’s Drowned World, and the story of David and Jonathan in the Book of Samuel. Fascinating, too, is the way in which Schmidt explores the fragmentary nature of the poem and the friable material upon which it was written." David Cooke The Manchester Review

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"In The Mother House (Gallery, €11.95), Ní Chuilleanáin’s established preoccupations – allegorical journeys, the ghosts of the past, religious life – are copiously on show, but with a newly sharpened elegiac edge." Aingeal Clare Guardian

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"A privileged, restless young woman, [Elizabeth Smart] sailed across the Atlantic at least twenty-two times, haunting London bookshops. That was where, in 1937, she first came upon the poetry of George Barker, then the wunderkind protege of T. S. Eliot. Upon reading Barker poems like “Daedalus” (“The moist palm of my hand like handled fear / Like fear cramping my hand”), she experienced a mental orgasm of sorts, later summing up her reaction as, “It is the complete juicy sound that runs bubbles over, that intoxicates til I can hardly follow . . . OO the a—a—a—!” She determined to marry him." Dale Hrabi • The Walrus

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"But [Robert] Lowell never returned the letters or showed copies to her. For a long time, it seemed they were lost. [Elizabeth] Hardwick, who died in 2007, supposed that Blackwood had destroyed them after Lowell’s death in 1977. In fact, Blackwood had saved them. In 1978 she gathered 102 letters from Hardwick to Lowell and sent them to Frank Bidart, Lowell’s literary executor. Acting on what he believed to be Lowell’s wishes, Bidart held the letters for ten years before depositing them at Harvard with instructions that they were to “be kept here at Houghton Library until the death of Elizabeth Hardwick.” Having been made public in The Dolphin without her permission, Hardwick’s letters would be preserved without her knowledge, and at Harvard to boot." Langdom Hammer NYRB

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"Creasy’s inclusion of Morley and Richards in Black Mountain Poems addresses the gender bias of Allen’s canon-making anthology. There were women writing poetry at Black Mountain, as Creasy’s volume makes slightly clearer. The selections (three poems by Morley and six by Richards) obscure as much as they reveal about these women’s creative lives, however." Lynne Feeley The Nation

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"A moral, not a moralizing writer, she practices humanism in a world where poets tend to value myth and the arcana at the expense of the empirical and human. Her metonomies are not literary gestures, her images are literal and laden. She is direct with a passionate voice she found out through reading and translating Marina Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva ‘enabled me to write without embarrassment. Because she doesn’t feel embarrassed about sounding undignified’. This was a further step away from English irony towards candour. She shared her discoveries with three generations of writers. Without her, writing, especially by women, would sound different in diction, measure and tone." Michael Schmidt on Elaine Feinstein PN Review

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