"But he also understood small back rooms to be places of intimacy, creativity, and negative capability—places where artists forge their ideas, where writers make their work, and where friendship and love (artistic and not) are built. Small back rooms are, above all, provisional spaces where ideas are worked out before performance, presentation, and action. Just because terrible things sometimes emerge from small back rooms doesn’t erase the importance of the sort of space they are. It is the intimacy of the small back room—the fact that it’s sheltered from the public eye and the marketplace of ideas—that makes it so vital, the very heart of “everything.”" Wayne Miller LitHub

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"You might think a great poet would be allowed the last word on his own life, especially when leaving specific directions on the matter. But after John Keats died in Rome, 200 years ago next Tuesday, his friends decided that the prescribed, one-line epitaph needed editorialising." Frank McNally Irish Times

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"In the morning of the anniversary, flowers will be laid by Keats’s tomb during a poetry reading. In the evening a virtual Keats, created by the Institute for Digital Archaeology in Oxford, will recite his poem Bright Star in a live feed from keats-shelley.org." Alison Flood Guardian

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"The language Bhanu Kapil uses is unstable: you never know where you are with it – any more than the guest knows how to situate herself – and this defines the work’s uncomfortable atmosphere, swivelling between compliance and resistance. There is a poem that begins by describing the “host’s gleaming hair” that “responds beautifully to the shampoo / She has set out for us. / What’s mine is yours, / She says with a sweet smile.” So far, so glossy. But sweetness sours when the guest is banned from going out with the host’s adopted Filipino daughter. And the poem then slides into obscenity (the host’s thoughts, it would seem): "I can smell your vagina. / Are you wearing your genitals / As a brooch?" You might reasonably object that much of this writing is too perfunctory to be poetry, only that objection quickly starts to be frivolously beside the point. For Kapil’s memorable protest depends upon her ability to overturn poetic expectation." Kate Kellaway Observer

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"In preparation for the trip north, in the early summer of 1990, I bundled my clay, my tools, and my modelling stand into the trunk, and thought about the man on Grizzly Peak. Since that reading in Los Angeles, Miłosz had lost his first wife, Janka, and a more sustained return to Poland was now on the horizon. For most of his life no one, least of all ‘the Wrong Honorable Professor Milosz [sic], Who wrote poems in some unheard of tongue’, would have imagined his future status." Jonathan E Hirschfield PN Review

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"He does not run a public relations campaign, as do many poets, for the gentleness of his intentions. He makes a habit of independent thought. He is the sort of snake that doesn’t hiss but just strikes. “I am looking down at you, at you and yours,” he writes in “What One Must Contend With,” “Your stories and friends, your banal ludicrous dreams.” You would not necessarily want him in charge of your DNR." Dwight Garner NYT

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"Kevin Young wasn’t kidding when he said Berryman wasn’t for everyone. When the editors state that his “references to women can be demeaning”, they weren’t kidding either. Yet I was unprepared for just how demeaning. His asinine, “Why do you need a poetass?” to James Laughlin in June 1940 when Laughlin was seeking a female poet for the New Directions list was par for the course." Martina Evans The irish Times

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"Despite being littered with the debris of technology and a sense of unease, the best poems here pull themselves out of the wreckage, reaching upwards while never fully shedding the latent guilt in [Derek Mahon's] desire to be free." Seán Hewitt The Irish Times

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"By comparing Poets and Talkers along these lines, the researchers were able to draw two overall conclusions. First, when compared to the Talkers, the poets tended to speak more slowly and stay within a narrower pitch range. Second, very few Talkers indulged in long pauses, but plenty of poets—33 percent—had no trouble leaving their listeners hanging for two seconds or more." Cara Giaimo • Atlas Obscura

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"Mythological plagues are often indications that something is very wrong, an invitation to look more closely at assumptions and injustice, a judgment. It is worth remembering that Sophocles’ famous play debuted in 429 BC. The plague of Athens had broken out the previous year, and 429 saw a second wave. The references to a plague, in combination with a criticism of state leadership, would have been eerily topical and resonant for the audience in a time of war and pandemic, for all that the play is set in a legendary past and another city." A.E. Stallings • Hudson Review

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"This is the zone that vouchsafes Mahon’s sensual, visionary moments, and many poems of Harbour Lights disport themselves with such imaginative joy. He pulled off the trick again in Against the Clock (2018). (From Washing Up, perhaps “Another Cold Spring” can be added to the list.) In these two collections, separated by thirteen years, Mahon produced some of the finest anglophone poems of his time." Justin Quinn TLS

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"The American poet James Tate once said he wanted to “use the image as a kind of drill to penetrate the veils of illusion we complacently call the Real World”. Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetic mission has been to do much the same – a mission that has been accomplished with some of the finest poetry of the past fifty years." Gerard Smyth DRB

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"Setting the short life and “blazing art” of Sylvia Plath beside the work of a more fortunate poet, in some ways the luckiest of all poets, Seamus Heaney, may at first seem very strange. But as different as these two writers were, they were both caught in the webs of fame." David Mason Hudson Review

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"The book refrains, though, from engaging with ideas, and operates by a series of close-ups, reporting on the poems and attempting to tally them with Heaney’s movements. He usefully reminds us of Heaney’s extra­literary activism, his participation in the Civil Rights marches, his service on the Arts Council during the 1970s, his public support for abortion rights in the 1980s, and his initial excitement about Field Day. It is not quite right, either, to say that Foster’s book is generally reliable on matters outside poetry. On the Irish-language context, he calls the self-admonishing poem ‘Fill Arís’ by Sean O Riordáin [sic] a ‘controversial manifesto’. He is ambivalent about Field Day, as was Heaney, but surely unwise to say that Heaney was vital to ‘attracting financial sponsorship, especially from American sympathizers’. Sympathizers!" John McAuliffe PN Review

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"Belieu’s poems often present uneasy pas de deux between rivals, as though strained coöperation were the prerequisite for beauty. She refuses her therapist’s “custom-order hindsight,” and decides instead “to make like Ginger Rogers / forever waltzing backward down the stairs, / partnered with a man who never liked her.” That’s a brilliant metaphor for the retrospective method of psychotherapy, guided not by “faith” but by an empirical “process / of elimination.”" Dan Chiasson • New Yorker

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"Mahon’s contribution to poetry, to human culture, can be described as an aesthetic intervention within the idea of a known self in conflict with an alien other: an encounter that takes place at the heart of the various interlocking structures." Oana Sanziana Marian The Yale Review

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"As much as movements of people drive progress, individuals also need to be able to see themselves as potential protagonists in history. Two recent poems that bring this to life vividly are “Cork Schoolgirl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016” by Victoria Kennefick, where the protagonist feels her way into Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising, and Danez Smith’s “Dinosaurs in the Hood”, a plea to destroy the racial stereotypes of industrialised storytelling." Rishi Dastidar Guardian

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"But at the same time, after so long being in lockdown, there is the absolute joy of seeing poets, writers, and colleagues I know and love on Zoom when they are reading or even just attending events. Even if their camera is off and I just see their names, I get excited." Zoe Brigley Poetry London

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