"Among the criteria for dating photos: a man wearing a fez indicates it is probably before 1913, when Ottoman Ioannina was incorporated into the nation of Greece; women showing a flash of ankle in the street mean it is probably before the First World War. The presence of the minaret of the Bairakli Mosque proves a terminus ante quem: the building’s roof was blown off in November 1912." A.E. Stallings • TLS

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"The poems I selected are not about cultural or ethnic personal identity; they consider social conditions created by the settler-colonial state and how such conditions may impinge on identity, or attempt to erase identity. As I started to think about the effects of resistance poems, I also began to question the frequently drawn distinction between, on the one hand, poems of private consideration (such as those communing with nature, an object of romantic love, or other loci of meaning English language readers often associate with the English Romantics or the American Transcendentalists), and poems of public concern in which political agency and resistance are the subjects, akin to Kei Miller’s ‘something larger’. The anthology represents the return to concerns with collective identity at a time when concerns of personal identity seem to dominate as a mode for poetry published today, particularly in the United States." Nyla Matuk PN Review

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"These “letter poems”—which often alter Hardwick’s words, and sometimes attribute whole quotations from others to her—puncture the fantasy of the new life otherwise indulged in The Dolphin, in ways so devastating to Lowell and Caroline Blackwood that they constitute a raid on the entire project of the book." Dan Chiasson • Yale Review

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"The bland, uninflected nature of [Morgan] Parker’s writing here is part of the devastating critique of White liberalism. Had the writing been less measured the point would have been lost. Parker’s writing is couched a kind of politeness which, in itself, ironises the statement." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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"Cows – denigrated symbols of motherhood – are the most endearing of Hill’s signature animals. Refigured and transfigured throughout her collections – here they are made of roses or rubies – they never become tired perhaps because the urgency never goes away: we need to really see them in the same way as we need to see her oddball narrators who are so clear-sighted even if they might toss a “big head like a caber” or “swing the sweetcorn by its hair”." Martina Evans The Poetry Review

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"I’m drawn to the seriousness and relentlessness of Bidart’s work—the sense that he is using the best tools he has, and inventing new tools, to ask the most important and difficult questions he can of life and of himself. To read him is to experience someone writing utterly without defense, with a kind of lacerating honesty." Garth Greenwell • The Atlantic

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"Riley remark[s] on how the “tension between exposure and the wish not to be seen at all” is “held especially sharply” by the lyric poem." Maria Johnston The Poetry Review

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"The two poets, with a history of a ten-year friendship, were at each other’s throats, discussing recent Polish history and, particularly, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The Uprising, to Herbert, was the moment of national heroism. To Miłosz – an example of political idiocy. When on the warm summer night in Berkeley the two poets got heavily drunk, Miłosz provocatively said that for a nation so deprived of sense, it would be better to be under the Soviet rule. Herbert reacted, in the most unparliamentary language, by accusing Miłosz of cowardice during the war and of conformism under Stalinism (Miłosz, for a while, worked a diplomat in Stalinist Poland)." Jerzy Jarniewicz Arete

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"Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, who has died at the age of 53, had a profound influence on the course of British poetry." A.B. Jackson • The Scotsman

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"For these poets, “lineage” is not an abstract concept. As Szymaszek says in a 2018 interview with Cutbank, her affiliation with the Poetry Project made her “part of a lineage” of “active poets” who are “interested in the history of poetry, and what needs to be passed on.” As hallowed poetic ground rich with history that continues to host and support young poets, the Project is at the heart of this lineage-building. “I don’t really describe my own lineage in a particular way,” Szymaszek says, “though I will say I worship at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.”" Nick Sturm The Georgia Review

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"In his early poems, one hears the echoes of Yeats, and a search for an archetypal medium for a sort of dark pastoral. Here, [John] Montague (in his own words) “felt their shadows pass // Into that dark permanence of ancient forms”." Sean Hewitt Irish Times

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"Here, the redactions, the gaps within lines, the slashes, the lyrical essays and the syntactical disruptions feel like assurances of the author’s up-to-dateness. Are these devices signals, or are they deployed with authenticity and skill?" Kathryn Maris TLS

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"[T]his is not merely highbrow fan fiction for Odyssey enthusiasts." Declan Ryan on Alice Oswald TLS

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"MacGreevy’s Poems, Beckett’s Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates and Devlin’s Intercessions – expressed a kind of militant syntactical anger in defiance of the more traditional airs and graces of leading poets such as FR Higgins; the same in relation to art and artists. But it would be a misreading to think that these men and women constituted a self-conscious “group” as MacGreevy more than anything else shows, his commitment to Ireland and Irish art as a national concept was as a passionate European." Gerald Dawe Irish Times

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"The fallout is captured in real time in the hundreds of letters that follow—Hardwick’s bitter discovery and recrimination, Lowell’s self-serving evasiveness, their separation and divorce, the unexpected period of creative output that followed, the incredible damage wrought by The Dolphin, and their eventual unlikely reconciliation." Dustin Illingworth • The Nation

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"Over more than three decades and thirteen books of poems, Carl Phillips has been conducting an inquiry into intimacy, especially sexual intimacy, that is as daring, as wild, and as reverent—as unflinching—as the inquiry I read in Haring’s mural." Garth Greenwell • Sewanee Review

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"Of course, the lyric poet in the twentieth century lives with the legacy of objectivism and modernism. But [Amanda] Berenguer’s determined gaze creates portraits of considerable depth and beauty. And she creates a seemingly effortless combination of space and intimacy." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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"Just occasionally, one discovers a new poet who is indisputably in the first rank, a poet who seems, almost effortlessly, to be able to move and challenge the reader. Dario Jaramillo is such a poet and one who has been lucky to find a translator as self-effacing and skilful as Stephen Gwyn, whose versions are rhythmically adroit, musical, and true to the text and the spirit of their originals." David Cooke The Manchester Review

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"There’s a message in this poem, I guess, but it’s not transformative. The likes take us nowhere, and nothing can ever change again for Eric Garner—he can go nowhere now. What we see at the end is just a man who (unlike us) is no longer breathing. The poem’s flat language is an act of trust, and what makes this an idealistic poem. Instead of trusting metaphoric leaps or originality or any sort of verbal sparks, it trusts flat, banal, utterly normal language. Maybe that makes it seem possible that banal, flat, normal humans can do better than we have been doing." Daisy Fried Plume

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"Somewhere, right now, someone will be preparing to attack those sentences. There have always been gangs in poetry – groups or movements formed in the interests of self-protection or self-promotion. But in our febrile, fissile times, poets have shown themselves only too ready to turn on their own in ways that show a dangerous contempt for what poetry is – for the imaginative and rhetorical and aesthetic practices that are its life, and that ought to be sacrosanct, at least among practitioners. (It’s not as if defending them is a priority for anyone else.) No one has put this more forcefully than Michael Hofmann, in his recent TLS review of Les Murray, where he decried a moment “when poetry is seen most readily – almost pre-emptively – as a dangerous form of trespass or encroachment (‘How does this demean me? Where is the diss in it?’)” and concluded, “Unless and until poetry gets free of this base and neurotic form of invigilation, it won’t be – and there won’t be – poetry”." Alan Jenkins TLS

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" It takes time to achieve even a basic competence in any language and few will have the leisure to gain a reading knowledge of the languages of Gilgamesh. Increasingly though, anglophone readers only ever gain access to foreign literature through the lens of their own global language. Consequently, it is all too easy for them to fall into the trap of thinking that what they read in their own language is somehow entirely synonymous with the original. Latin and Greek disappeared long ago from most schools and even the major European languages are under threat in our universities. ‘Virgil’ in English is not the same as Publius Vergilius Maro in Latin. The same could be said about such widely read poets as Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Rilke." David Cooke The Manchester Review

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"Recognizing the logistical unfeasibility of making literature accessible through economic development, UNESCO has essentially recategorized literature as a legacy activity of aging elites — a “residual rather than an emergent practice.” Way harsh, right? Put simply, what UNESCO learned through all its hard work is that literature requires surplus leisure time, publishing infrastructure, enforceable copyright policing, and accessible educational institutions in order for the market of symbolic goods to also function as a market that pays livable wages. In the absence of these very expensive networks, the dominant character of world literature — whatever its content might become — can only remain of equal concern to both the rich and the poor insofar as it continues to mark a defining line between them." Chris Findeisen LARB

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