"Val Warner, who has died aged 74, was a gifted poet, an editor, scholar, translator, teacher and occasional short-story writer. She was largely responsible for the rediscovery of the early-20th-century poet Charlotte Mew, whose collected poetry and prose she edited for Carcanet/Virago in 1981." Patricia Craig Guardian

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"Saying too much is the default mode of political poetry—the default fault, too. The best political poets work in subtleties, not the shouts and finger-pointing that have long been the stump work of politics. Think of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” or Heaney’s “The Toome Road” rather than the grandstanding grand guignol of Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel.”" William Logan • New Criterion

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"At a time when performance is almost de rigueur in the poetry world, it is possible to see how radical the Nobel committee’s choice is, almost, as it were, affirming the primacy of the art against the preferences, not to say prejudices, of the age. The award of a Nobel Prize to a poet is a rare occurrence, to a female poet even rarer (only Gabriela Mistral and Wisława Szymborska precede Glück)." Michael Schmidt PN Review

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"Although the inversion of the adjective “lost” is convenient in terms of rhyme, Clare is too deft a poet for it not to earn its place at the line end: “I am like a memory” would be one thing; “like a memory lost” is a whole other level of displacement, whose effects can be seen in reverse some eight lines later: “Even the dearest that I love the best / Are strange – nay, rather, stranger than the rest” (the half-rhyme, “lost” / “best”, “rest”, picks up the connection). So much depended on recognition that the loss of it renders those who were formerly “dearest”, by a process of logical equivalence, the most strange. The poem was beginning to seep into my being like prophecy. The weeks turned into months, and the months were beginning to tell. There’s guilt – even as I toil up the back of the steep hill beyond my lane to take my daily exercise – that I am relatively unscathed; I am not on the breadline, retain my part-time job. But I am not immune." Jane Feaver The Poetry Review

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"Precision marks Starnino on and off the page, the type of skill that recently landed him in Oxford English Dictionary (where poems from Credo were chosen as exemplars for the terms “leaf-light” and “lenten-faced”). No dictionary is required to decode Dirty Words though – it’s as clean cut and satisfying as the pages it’s printed on." Jim Johnstone The Manchester Review

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"A poet and the state are at war over historical memory, and it has nothing to do with poetry being “political” or not. In cultures without historical memory, it’s memory that’s political." Valzhyna Mort • McSweeney's

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"Titian stayed in the city during the pestilence. He was at least 86; he might have been even older. He may have laboured on a number of paintings, but he definitely worked on one – the Pietà in the Accademia. Hale sees this as a quintessential piece of late work: ‘It is a commemoration of his artistic life, a dialogue with the paintings, sculptures and architecture that had nourished his genius, a final declaration of the capacity of paint to represent and improve upon stone sculpture, and a testament to his devotion to Christ and his mother Mary.’" Colm Toibin LRB

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"Several host websites that archive free downloadable and linkable poems, a sign of the low monetary stakes of poetry; no novelist would feel that an institution distributing their work for free was doing them a favor." Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young • ASAP Journal

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"She was a radical lesbian separatist who didn’t want men at her readings and would not respond to their questions. She was, it was thought, a humorless scold. Worse, Rich was perceived to have bent her sensitive talent on a political wheel. When Susan Sontag cracked her on the snout in an exchange of views in The New York Review of Books in 1975, referring to her “anti-intellectualism,” it was catnip for what would become my crowd. It took me two decades to push past this and to read Rich on my own." Dwight Garner NYT

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"[Jim Quinn] was, at the time, working toward his PhD in English literature — writing a dissertation on the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and lots of his own poetry. But editors who were fans of his food writing started reaching out with assignments." Stephen Fried Phildalphia

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"Chandas is also another name for poetic meter, a meaning which is easy to defend because mantras are covered in meters, and meters preserved these vedic mantras. According to 4th century BCE Yaskacharya’s etymological treatise called Nirukta, “chandāṃsi chādanāt” which means that vedic mantras are called chandas because they “cover.” To cover means to keep something covert, to keep a secret. To cover means to protect. Whereas we perish." Mani Rao Almost Island

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"There is a depth in Biden’s response to Heaney that clearly goes beyond mere political convenience. He has suffered terrible losses in his life and perhaps he finds particular solace in this poet who voyages into the underworld and speaks with the departed." Jonathan Jones Guardian

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"The celestial bodies in orbit around Amis are by now familiar to his devoted readers, both the minor (the Uranus of Wilfred Owen, the Pluto of J. G. Ballard) and the major (the Mars of Philip Larkin, the Venus of James Fenton). Amis has illuminated them all with the life-giving warmth of his brilliant, generous and sometimes unsparing critical writing." Tom Bissell NYT

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"Knacky keen and swift was the flighty hare that flitted almost up to me in Fogarty’s near field” begins one breathless event. In another, Grennan wonders what to sing to seals, “those three pitch-eyed salt-slick hound-heads gazing unblinkingly back at me”. Wrens and jackdaws, cows and horses; each meeting with a fellow creature seeks to reach more deeply into “one life, quick-snatched as it’s passing and in vain snatched at”." Michael Viney Irish Times

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