"The poets I return to most are those whose work performs this in such a way that I feel invited to participate, to conjure alongside: René Char, Gennady Aygi, Raúl Zurita, Paul Celan, Aimé Césaire, Anne Carson. Gertrude Stein, of course. These are all major poets, and more or less prolific, but their presence—the presence of their oeuvre—never feels oppressive to me. It feels permissive." G.C. Waldrep • Image Journal

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"English and London, where Chan is currently based, are spaces where she explores her sexuality yet exists as a person of color in a “historically white space”; Cantonese and Hong Kong, the city where she was born and raised, challenge her queerness and make her otherness visible. “To the Chinese, you & I are chopsticks: lovers with the same anatomies,” Chan explains in “//”. Indeed, the forward slashes that title the poem resemble chopsticks and are slanted, deliberately not-straight." May Huang Hong Kong Review of Books

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"Manhire himself is critical of the self-mythologising and self-aggrandising nature that poets sometimes have, saying, “The kinds of poets I dislike are the superior ones. I sometimes like to write poems that tease the self-importance that poetry can suffer from. I know my own work occasionally looks a bit obscure, but I don’t ever want to condescend to the reader, or come across as sanctimonious. That’s what really puts people off poetry.”" Rose Lu Stuff

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"Her style is simultaneously humorous, ironic and confrontational. This is especially effective and welcome in How To Wash a Heart, the first of her books to be published in the UK, where she was born (she now lives between the UK and the US). It comprises a sequence, written in rare lineated verse, recounting the experiences of an immigrant with precarious visa status living in the home of a white host." Dominic Leonard TLS "A prolific artist and writer, and the recipient of numerous awards (most recently the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, 2020), Bhanu Kapil is undoubtedly an important figure in contemporary poetry. I first came across her work in 2013; The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (2001) was recommended to me after I lamented my own gap in knowledge of poetry written by South Asian women. Even as a South Asian woman myself, it felt sometimes impossible to retrieve such work back then, particularly given the pervading whiteness of the industry and even within my own private writing circles. For me, the collection’s long lines of imagination, how it associated and dissociated between continents, between voices, opened a world of possibility." Alycia Pirmohamed The Scores

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"A grim tableau no doubt, but, the poem tells us, things don’t have to be this way. A different future is possible: ‘Strange, / only the imagination can set us right / and that means poetry, some version of it.’ The dreadful irony, of course, is that these lines are taken from the last new Derek Mahon poem in the last new Derek Mahon book we’ll ever read. The world goes on waltzing in its bowl of cloud, and although it has lost this remarkable poet, it is the richer for having his poems in it. They might even help to set us right." Tara McEvoy The Stinging Fly

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"His later voice is, if possible, even more secure – unhurried and unstrained. With the heaviest subjects, he travels light. With lighter subjects, he knows how to hold them in place." Kate Kellaway Observer

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"Reading Shadow of the Owl (Bloodaxe Books, £10.99) is to be party to an intense freefall, as it happens to Matthew Sweeney. The darkest, strongest of his fabulist poems, streamed out in 10 months between his diagnosis with motor neuron disease and his death in 2018, the title sequence written when he waited for a diagnosis, finally delivered by an unseen neurologist via his mobile phone." Martina Evans Irish Times

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"In a recent study of The Poet’s Notebook conducted by a PhD student at my University, a recurring pattern was uncovered: poetic observations at the front; practical information at the back; a whole load of empty pages in between. You may or may not recognise your own habits here, but what does the observation tell us about poets and their working patterns in general? Maybe the white blankness mirrors a real-life chasm that exists between creative endeavour and practical organisation. Maybe it indicates the ethereal workings of the poetic imagination. Maybe it tells us that poems begin as notes but take shape elsewhere. Or maybe it simply tells us that poets don’t love stationary as much as they say they do. Whatever the answer, I kept thinking about notebooks while I was reading and re-reading the wonderful poems of Suzannah V. Evans." Tara Bergin Carcanet

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"The poems Rilke wrote in the same period made up the New Poems of 1907 and 1908. Forget the horrid and ubiquitous Letters to a Young Poet, forget Duino, forget The Sonnets to Orpheus. They are for me his greatest poems, and Malte his greatest book." Michael Hofmann • LRB

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"Yeats scholars will be interested in his descriptions of the author Katharine Tynan (“a writer of exquisite religious poetry”) and CH Oldham, the editor of the Dublin Literary Review, who is said by some to be a political radical “up to the lips in plots and away in his house on the slopes of the mountains. He entertains nihilists and other strange people.”" Ronan McGreevy Irish Times

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"The Beggar was originally self-published by the poet in 1924. (Two of the twenty-two poems also appeared that year in Harold Monro’s Chapbook.) Fame of course did not follow, and there’s a story that Mason despairingly threw 200 copies of The Beggar into Auckland Harbour. The tale is probably apocryphal, but over the years it has struck a chord with many New Zealand poets." Bill Manhire Granta

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"While we may infer that the poem took years to craft, it is written as if it were a stream of consciousness during sleepless a.m. hours, with [Ross] Gay (or, at least, the narrator) watching the highlight reel over and over again. But remember: he’s not watching so much as he is witnessing, trying to make sense of why this seemingly trivial act (it’s just a layup! it’s only two points!) has become so iconic." Eric Morales-Franceschini Boston Review

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"However, Rivkin reclaims the identity of a suitor by focusing on the poet as a pursuer—as haunted—and as one who is pursued—not only in life, but in the artistic work of memory, research, transformation, composition, and revision. Rivkin, like his father and like Haber, is an alchemist-farmer who sees the “good earth” and “change[s] ‘stones’ into ‘bread’ ”; transformation, a goal of artists and scientists alike, becomes just as important a story as the one about the absent father and lost son. As the familiar, domestic life is made strange and the unfamiliar, scientific past is made intimate, Rivkin recasts autobiographical poetry as transformative work in an intertexutal ecosystem of desires, past and present." Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Georgia Review

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"The first duty of the artist is to be lucky. To be there like the photographer, on the spot at the right time and with the right equipment to capture what is going on." Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin DRB

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"The author has grown old. He is eighty now. He is a little surprised by the success of his prose and his poems, but as much by his longevity." CP Cavafy, tr Evan Jones Poetry

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"It’s difficult to know how common it is for poets to cease writing after one book like Hannan did. In 1995, one hundred poetry collections were published by Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Faber, Smith|Doorstop, Anvil Press, Seren, Enitharmon, Chatto & Windus, Stride, Jonathan Cape and Picador. Including Liar, Jones, only three were debuts without a later follow-up. (All three such debut poets are women.) Perhaps this says something of the commissioning at those publishers rather than anything else; there are around 450 other publishers and small presses represented in the National Poetry Library’s holdings for 1995, among which there are doubtless many other examples." Charles Whalley The Poetry Review

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"New Ireland was perhaps surprisingly receptive to developments in modernism, publishing JM Hone on French intellectual thought, and the celebrated translator of Plotinus Stephen MacKenna’s plea for Gaelic verse to embrace poetic freedom and metres “perhaps from Japan or Hungary”. Lennox Robinson gave a cranky review of Ezra Pound’s Lustra, finding those poems that were “in the vague imagist style” most pleasing, but yanking Pound’s “defective ear” for his vain attempts “to do what only music can do”." Karl O'Hanlon The Irish Times "The 1921 newsletter of Gresham’s School in Norfolk records the names of two pupils who had excelled in science that year: a 14-year-old WH Auden and a 15-year-old Erskine Childers." Conor Leahy The irish Times

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"At one time, Charles’s elder brother, John Howard Parnell, established a walking stick and umbrella manufacturers in Avondale." Oliver O'Hanlon The Irish Times

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