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poetry, essays, ideas
"The challenge of Glück’s poetry is not in its diction – which is often elemental, monosyllabic, recognisably lyric – and not in its syntax, either, which is easily graspable: the challenge is in reading the implications of the sentences, the way one sentence opens to the next, and the power of the unsaid, what’s felt in the movement or leap between lines and sentences as much as what’s in them." Joshua Weiner and Daniel Tiffany in conversation PN Review
"My favourite definition of a poem at the moment comes courtesy of Valéry: ‘A prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.’ I think poetry will always hesitate between music and meaning, and individual poems will settle at various points on the continuum. Sometimes, too, the hesitation will be part of the poem’s primary affect. The idea of song also reinforces that sense of poetry as something that once existed only as musical utterance – chant and charm and incantation. A 1974 anthology of Māori poetry translated into English is called The Singing Word, and that seems fair enough." Bill Manhire PN Review
"[Ciaran] Carson’s gorgeous sequence Still Life ranks among his very best work. Written over the course of just a few months following a terminal cancer diagnosis, this characteristically discursive and witty collection reads like an envoi to his wife Deirdre. The lapse of time is marked, symbolically, by the decay of a lemon – “we wanted to see with our own eyes / The end of the life cycle of the lemon” (‘Angela Hackett’) – and the development of a building site near their Belfast home. Frequent mentions of hospital visits and medical treatments in turn augur Carson’s own decline. Yet while the mood is elegiac, the collection is above all a paean to art and life – to the senses, the mind, and love." Chris Cusack The Poetry Review
" I was so embarrassed when I read it, I decided to write you a letter of apology. I shuddered at my critiques of what I called your “leaps of obscurity” in the book. The tiny eyes of a young poet. Icarus critiquing the wings of Daedalus just before takeoff. I’ve learned to embrace the confusion I sometimes experience inside a poem. (Our young poets will ask for an example and I will say find your own damn example of confusion.)" Terrance Hayes on Yusef Komunyakaa Boston Review
"My career as a writer started really late, after I retired from teaching at Wellesley. And it really got started for me as a translator, as somebody who had done a lot of books of translation. So I was “a translator,” in the sense that it was different from being a poet. But like every other translator of a poem, you get to feel that the long poem (or the long set of poems) by some writer that you’re translating, however ancient, is your poem. There’s a bizarre sense in which I am right now writing the Aeneid." David Ferry in conversation with Daniel Bosch and George Kalogeris Literary Matters
"There are also very few writers you will remember where you were, when you were, how you were, upon first reading. It is no exaggeration to write that you, Friederike Mayröcker, have been one of them for me.”" Alexander Booth • A Public Space

"So: a verse-novel set in a sci-fi future. Guriel wastes no time in acquainting us with a subculture there, one whose members indulge a fascination with, of all things, obscure rock bands. (Not least of Guriel’s achievements, from my Bach-besotted perspective, is his making me ask myself why one wouldn’t be fascinated with obscure rock bands.)”" Daniel Brown • Literary Matters

"We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early nineteen-thirties, when a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, with the seemingly innocuous title “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making.”" Adam Kirsch • New Yorker

"Having spent twenty-three lines painting a picture of the ‘proto-dream-house’ and what she might do in it, Bishop performs a shuddering U-turn, dismissing the whole fantasy in the space of two words: ‘But – impossible’. Two words and a dash, rather – the entire business of why this fantasy is impossible is left hanging, unstated, in the space of that dash, a kind of shrugged blank for the reader to fill in for herself." Helen Tookey • Moxy

"So why does Martin Amis go to such lengths to imagine this intimate kinship with Larkin? It provides good copy. Larkin’s name sells books. But the reason lies deeper than this." James Booth • The Critic

"The Ecuadorian poet, who has been hailed by Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda as “the best Latin American poet of his generation,” has finally made his book-length debut in English—or, more precisely, in “postenglish.”" Olivia Lott • Words Without Borders



New poems

Mary Ruefle the Poetry Review

Ocean Vuong The Yale Review

James Brown The Spinoff

Jana Prikryl Atlantic

Rebecca Hazleton Kenyon Review



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The Page is edited by John McAuliffe, Vincenz Serrano and, since September 2013, Evan Jones at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. It was founded in October 2004 by Andrew Johnston, who edited it until October 2009.
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