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"How odd it is to miss the poetry reading, the gathering in person from time to time to listen to an author speak aloud their words. And stranger perhaps that such a simple, fairly unchanging format has endured for so long. “Aren’t the persuasions of poetry private?” the American poet Kay Ryan once asked. “The right sized room to hear poetry is my head, the words speaking from the page”. This year, with the ongoing Covid restrictions, the perfectly-sized venue of our own heads is overdue an airing. The social connection fostered by live events, allowing for the meeting of minds, has been a significant loss. The cause of our disconnection, lest we forget, is that breath – so integral to the poetic endeavour – is temporarily dangerous." Colette Bryce Poetry Ireland Review

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"Hopefully more poems like Noor Hindi’s 2020 clarion call “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” which simultaneously attacks M.F.A. culture and crosses the brightest red line in American politics: Palestine." Viet Thanh Nguyen • New York Times

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"Much of the tepid free verse is about flowers. Or birds. Or trees." Dwight Garner • New York Times

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"Within the relatively brief compass of a review it is only possible to hint at the subtlety, richness and transformative power of these poems. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems is a uniquely compelling body of work that has the coherence and inevitability of a natural growth. It is a fitting monument to her passionate concern to ride ‘the horses of meaning’ and to ‘let their hooves print the next bit of the story.’" David Cooke The Manchester Review

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"Grief, never far from poetry, was an integral part of the truly terrific books of 2020. Poems written before Covid became chillingly prescient, as if poets had known what was coming." Martina Evans and Seán Hewitt on the best books of 2020 Irish Times

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"Guriel depicts his world as a wide and wonderful imaginative landscape, capable of much, and shows perhaps far more patience with creation than any author this side of Christian Bök. In an ironic and meta turn of the screw, Forgotten Work has the potential to become the object of the very kind of micro-fan obsession it explores.." Micheline Maylor • Quill & Quire

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"In a year filled with absence and longing, Evan Jones’ translation of The Barbarians Arrive Today was the Cavafy I so desperately needed but didn’t know I wanted." Alexandra Marraccini • Review 31

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"Apocalypse is passionate. It represents a raised pitch and extended conceptual scope, a turn towards biblical and epic tone if only momentarily, and an amplification of address by which words may transcend even an excessive figurative function which remains controlled, such as Surrealism, and appear to violate the dialect itself, momentarily or consistently." Peter Riley • Fortnightly Review

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"This poet’s special quality includes her ability to write about people left behind or shooed off to the margins. It goes well beyond her choice of subjects – indeed many of the poems are on lighter personal themes: loves, friendships, an enjoyable rackety youth; or on the natural world, or views in Greece; the range is quite broad. Freedom to choose goes with her achieved perspectives; the subtitle that denies the “confessional” also smartly refuses the company of poets whose capital is other people’s trauma." Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin DRB

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"For Wiman, Herbert was ‘conscious of some secular element at the very heart of making art, some necessary imaginative flair in himself that needed to be subdued, or at least tidied up and made fit for sacrifice.’ It might be that Wiman, writing in the first quarter of the 21st century, feels less the need to tidy up his ‘necessary imaginative flair’; he has, after all, had various platforms on which to exercise his imagination over the years." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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"The most substantial poem in the collection is ‘Warm Ocean’, a poem which begins with what looks like a typo: ‘Someone says lonely let’s go for a stroll.’ This voice is joined by another someone and another, all uttering platitudes – ‘someone says it was never about the money’ – more or less out of context, or with the only context being this stroll that everyone, now ‘we,’ go on together. The stroll takes in a landscape made up of cliffs and ocean, a long stretch of wood, a stream-bed; birds, of course, and books; time, in the form of a past ‘before the vows and boasts / before the oars demanding water’ and in terms of the noise of the world, the stones that go ‘clock cluck clock’; and by the end of the poem, which also seems to be the end of the world, we are left with small fires, shipwrecks, and (unsurprising only because this is a Bill Manhire poem) an orchestra ‘breaking up the ballroom.’" Anna Jackson ANZL

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"If poets and fiction writers attend a party, they’ll segregate themselves, each cluster as comradely and comfortable as Victorian men settling down for cigars and serious talk, now that the pernicious listeners have been banished." Elizabeth Tallent Threepenny Review

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"There are some characteristic Johnson touches in that speech (he emphasizes Horace’s hypocrisies, cowardice and compromises over the more dignified and stoical elements in the Odes; and reduces the poetry to the question of whether journalists are more important than politicians). But it is impossible to deny the ease and enjoyment with which Johnson cites Latin verse. And few other public figures would have observed that “there is a final sense in which Horace is not just a ward and protégé of Mercury but also carries out the ultimate function of that divinity”." Rory Stewart TLS

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"In fact, reading Berssenbrugge’s work occasionally feels like watching a softly narrated science documentary: “A body or galaxy requires continuous energy to maintain, like a whirlpool in a fast stream” (“Scalar”) or “Milky Way is an invisible potential, and I can imagine a wave function for the universe” (“The Loom”). That said, the rhapsodic lyricism that characterizes even Berssenbrugge’s most straightforward work is never too far away: “Subtle, entangled, the gestalt I speak of is between myself and an angel” (“Darkness”)." André Naffis-Sahely Poetry

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