"He doesn’t even have a name himself. He may have forgotten it. I tried to kill him off at the end of the title poem of Wow, but I suspect he won’t stay dead. There’s life in the old supposed person yet." Bill Manhire Carcanet

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"Artaud was the essential modernist, living in a body torn apart, embodying art." Joseph Houlihan • Chicago Review of Books

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"The poems, all of them, have that familiar, spare, feel to them ‑ the clarity of cold water, the measured cadence, the plain diction and the leaping insight so characteristic of her mature work ‑ but there is grief here of a depth and of a kind that chills the heart, a near-hopelessness at times, over and over a sense of self-accusation. The last line of “Lost” is “I should have taken more care.”" Theo Dorgan on Eavan Boland DRB

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"For several years, writing my verse novel, there was always something to wake up to: a plotline to advance, a character to add flesh to, another couplet to complete. Like an AI come into consciousness, Forgotten Work came to write itself." Jason Guriel • Literary Hub

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"I think Larkin is an excellent but limited poet; his three-stage model of poem-writing is, accordingly, excellent but limited." Amit Majmudar • Kenyon Review

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"I used to have a poodle that lived with me for eighteen years, and she loved tearing up any paper I crinkled and threw on the floor. It was great fun for her, shredding my bad translations. Now that I don’t have my poodle anymore, I have to do all the shredding, and it’s no fun at all." Don Mee Choi • Words Without Borders

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"I refuse to begin this essay with Ingeborg Bachmann’s death..." Reed McConnell • The Point

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"Rilke was well aware of connection and influence, faith and the desire to create, the need to be alone, to press an ear against an invisible wall and wait as long as necessary for the words to come." Jena Schmitt • PN Review

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"It has been noticed before that this king-size bloke, who once distinguished himself at rugger, handles his materials with rice-paper delicacy. Though equal to large conceptions, he is a lover of fragility and evanescence and excels at the moth-like lyric and crystal image." Derek Mahon on Longley Literary Review (2007)

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"His English is impressive, sometimes even showy. During his later years he was known for his essays as much as his poetry – and these, despite a maddeningly breezy tone, are often brilliant. Several, like those on Frost and Auden, are masterpieces of critical exposition. The autobiographical ones are among the best (‘Spoils of War’, ‘The Condition We Call Exile’); and Watermark, his book about Venice (yet another book about Venice), has wonderful moments of delighted imagery. Noting the violin necks of gondolas, he says ‘the whole city, especially at night, resembles a gigantic orchestra’, and he records memorable reflections about water, time and monsters (basilisks, sphinxes, winged lions, chimeras) – ‘our self-portraits, in the sense that they denote [our] genetic memory of evolution’." Derek Mahon on Brodsky Literary Review (2011)

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"Though certain poems have been singled out for especial assent – “Carrowdore”, “The Last of the Fire Kings”, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” (of course), “Courtyards in Delft” and so on – you could say that Mahon never wrote a line that doesn’t scintillate with a wayward brilliance – and this is true of his prose as well as his poetry. I’m thinking, for example, of the extraordinary essay called “Huts and Sheds”: a product of Mahon’s awesome erudition and concomitant lightness of touch, and written as an oblique tribute to the yen for solitude." Patricia Craig DRB

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"Temperamentally, Glück was the sort of poet “who [loves] perfection more than life,” as Bertrand Russell wrote. But unlike “the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems” and others to whom Russell attributed a Platonistic cast of mind, Glück was concerned not just with the abstract but with “the world of existence … fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries.” This posed a problem: life, uncertain, disappointed her. What somewhat redeemed the imperfection of life was the relative perfection of art. Poetry “is a form/ of suffering,” she writes—a kind of suffering, sure, but also a form, with a fixed and definite shape." Adam Plunkett The New Republic

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"Her poems are controlled and highly charged, restrained but also exposed, unafraid of and perhaps also terrified by outcry. Glück has described “harnessing the power of the unfinished”, to create a whole that does not lose the dynamic presence of what remains incomplete: “I dislike poems that feel too complete, the seal too tight; I dislike being herded into certainty.”" Colm Tóibín Guardian

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"Poetry has an advantage for the sprinting student. It entails the least reading… There is no ‘fiction’ or ‘drama’ establishment or Ofqual would have heard from them long ago about the either/or – as though there was some generic or qualitative equivalence. Poetry has had a louder institutional claque all along." Michael Schmidt PN Review

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"In 1975 I met the poet Gerard Fanning in UCD and he told me he had an early copy of the new book by Derek Mahon, ‘The Snow Party’ and if I came to his house on Foster Avenue that evening, I could look at it with him. It was just two dozen poems, thirty-eight pages. There was an extraordinary clarity and ease in the tone, a light metre; the voice that was wry and understated, but also careful that the emotion would not exceed its cause. It was strange how affecting lines like: ‘I am going home by sea/ For the first time in years’ could be, and how instantly memorable some phrases were, such as ‘The prisoners of infinite choice’ or ‘Even now there are places where a thought might grow.’ We knew that night that we were reading poems that would be there forever, relished by readers all over the world for as long as time lasts. We held the book like it was gold." Colm Tóibín Irish Times

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