"In the weeks leading up to The Dolphin’s publication, Hardwick and Lowell were not corresponding about the poems but instead having a prolonged, bitter exchange about a house in Maine. For fifteen years of their marriage, they had gone to Castine almost every summer—either driving up from New York or Boston, or flying to Bangor and driving down—and it had become one of the main coordinates of their life and work." Zachary Fine • The Point

---

"Peter van Toorn was deeply troubled. It was the 1970s, and an anti-formalist hostility was sweeping Canadian poetry. Poets couldn’t strip their practice of classical devices fast enough. Looking around at his peers, the twenty-six-year-old watched them all but desert the descriptive tradition he credited for the finest poems in the language." Carmine Starnino • New Criterion

---

"On March 3 two young poets, Myint Myint Zin and K Za Win, were killed. Both were also teachers, beloved by their students. Myint Myint Zin divulged her blood type on social media just before she died should anyone injured in the protests need a transfusion. K Za Win was said to be shielding others, including children, who were being fired upon just before he died." James Byrne • World Literature Today

---

"Adam Zagajewski, a prizewinning Polish poet and a former dissident in exile whose life and verse reverberated with laments over displacement and reminders that the past perseveres, died on March 21 in Krakow, Poland. He was 75." Sam Roberts • New York Times

---

"Kleinzahler has an eye for sudden bursts of the lyrical in unlikely settings and is always quick to note a patch of easily missed sunlight, “Late Winter Morning On The Palisades” (from Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow) found, “Candle in the throat of maple / alive in wet bark / like a soldering flame as the sun lifts / over Manhattan’s shoulder,” amidst the general clamour of “ … car doors, / jets, and the brutal slaying in Queens …”." Ross Moore DRB

---

"The collection begins in 1969 with Anne Ridler, who steps from Eliot’s shadow – as well as an accomplished poet, she was an editor at Faber – to assert her early influence over Schmidt, particularly in exhorting him to eschew a group name for his circle of poets and critics – and certainly not to use the proposed name of “Vividists.” The book ends in 2018 with medical doctor cum poet and essayist Iain Bamforth, whose affecting letter ranges from the death of a loved one to linguistic theory to Gadamer to his own poetry to Rilke and Rodin. In one letter, Bamforth embodies the best of what Carcanet and PN Review have become: a survey of the most intelligent, literate and creative thinking about poetry in Britain and the world. What Schmidt says of Bamforth should be said of himself, as editor and publisher: “There is nothing old-fashioned about him, but there is a broad living culture still informing everything he says and does.”" Kevin Gardner Wild Court

---

"The poem cannot heal itself, and that failure seems a launching position for much of what has come afterward. No heroics. No rescuing savior. No gathering of internal resources against the battering dark. Just a poem that buckles under the impossible weight of its fierce sincerity." Vona Groarke LARB

---

"A new experimental pamphlet, Performances in All Directions from Julie Morrissy (Pizza, Poetry, Pub €12.50), mixes field notes, images, poetry and text with poignant effect. Certain Individual Women takes its title from “very recent though now defunct, Irish legislation that relates to the type of information a woman can receive while pregnant” – juxtaposing the personae of three women alongside documentary legal poems." Martina Evans Irish Times

---

“The poems record the dreamlife of a character named Henry, who was, according to Berryman, “a white American in early middle age.” Henry was a dream version of his maker, Berryman’s avatar and effigy. When Elizabeth Bishop read 77 Dream Songs (1964), the first book-length installment of the project, she confided to Robert Lowell, “Some pages I find wonderful, some baffle me completely.” It’s not hard to see why.”Kamran Javadizadeh NYRB

---

"“At the dawn of Western narrative, Homer’s Odysseus sets sail.” So begins Margaret Cohen’s The Novel and the Sea (2012). Robert Graves would not have agreed. “English poetic education,” he argued in 1948, “should, really, begin not with the Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin” – an Old Irish incantation said to have been recited by the bard Amergin as the Milesians invaded Ireland. “I am Wind on Sea/ I am Ocean-wave,/ I am Roar of Sea.” Nicholas Allen’s Seatangled returns Irish literature to its coastal beginnings, imagining a “liquid” island whose “waterborne narratives” need to be recovered, reimagined and retold." Claire Connolly Irish Times

---

"Recently, when one of my friends called me an activist, I wondered if it was true. I am no Paul Bogle, no Welsh Chartist, but more and more I wonder if activism is an activity rather than a label to live up to. To take just one example, I am a member of the eco- poetry community, Poets for the Planet. For as long as I’m committed to this role and working to fulfil our aims, then I am active – so why not go the next step and call it what it is? I am an activist. Interviewing Ian Humphreys for Poets for the Planet taught me so much about the writing process, as we explored the queer themes of his work and how they related to a wider ecological consciousness." Marvin Thompson Poetry London

---

“But if I cannot translate a poet because she is a woman, young, black, an American of the 21st century, neither can I translate Homer because I am not a Greek of the eighth century BC. Or could not have translated Shakespeare because I am not a 16th-century Englishman.”Guardian

---

"With each collection of poems, Farrell has absorbed new tones and registers in ways subtle enough that it is easy to miss a decisive shift in the make-up of whimsy and seriousness in his work." Louis Klee • Sydney Review of Books

---

"Time now for Ferlinghetti, for his poets kaddish, or aria of lament. The beat will go on. The mourners’ words will roll in healthy dissent, purposeful euphoric living and shake all assumptions. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an everlasting star in our literary cosmos." Annice Jacoby • Literary Hub

---