"As in Anne Carson’s masterful long poem, The Glass Essay (“You remember too much,/ my mother said to me recently.// Why hold on to all that? And I said,/ Where can I put it down?’), the poems in [Liz] Quirke’s collection wrestle with the task of crafting vessels of their own. In 'December(s)', two scenes are presented, a year apart: the first is clipped and stark, and the second unspools, making full use of the page. Elsewhere, there is a cinematographic attention to perspective, so that grief is examined from many angles, all coursing through the speaker: “My father is dirty water sluicing through my veins”." Seán Hewitt Irish Times

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"The Diaspora poets looked back on their homeland with a different gaze from the poets who were and are still living within Zimbabwe. The new voices that emerged from within Zimbabwe were rooted in the struggles of their predecessors who wrote protest poetry against the regime. The new millennium has also seen an increase in prominent female poets." Togara Muzanenhamo Almost Island

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"While there is both the profound and the weighty in The Readiness, [Alan] Gillis does not squat Atlas-like before the reader, demanding our appreciation of his effort in the bearing of great weight." Patrick Davidson Roberts The High Window

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"The history of literature contains some faint parallels to his performance of multiple authorship. William Butler Yeats created Michael Robartes and Owen Hearne, a duo of “collaborators” with contrasting personalities. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875–1939) also signed some of his poems and prose pieces with the names of two alter egos: Juan de Mairena and Abel Martín, who was Mairena’s “master.” But no writer can rival Pessoa’s achievement of configuring, through his heteronyms, radically different poetic and philosophical attitudes that formed a glorious if not always harmonious musical ensemble." Richard Zenith Lithub

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"Early on she quotes a remark of his about how a poem manages to make sense: “There is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction.” Like George, Mary [Oppen] was as attuned to understanding the dynamics of a moment of conviction as she was wary of turning it into an imperative about how to write or what to think. Life is lived, art created and responsibility renewed through a constant, often painstaking sense of readjustment from moment to moment, word to word, conviction to conviction. The concision, clarity and candor with which Mary describes such moments of readjustment, and her and George’s lives more generally, is the signature of Meaning a Life." John Palattella The Point

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" Shelley talks about “a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own”. Well, if you’re identifying with it, you’re not going out of your own nature. You’ve got out of your own nature and then – how charming – you find it’s you! All this pretence has made me love again, and more than ever, DH Lawrence’s poems about other creatures, other species. Such reminders of the limits of the sympathetic imagination." Christopher Ricks New Statesman

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"Ever the impoverished poet, Michael Horovitz rarely lost an opportunity to sell his books – often out of shopping bags. They include four volumes of the Poetry Olympics and his last publication, A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium (2007), a jeremiad on the state of the nation, and the state of the planet. Like his friend Jeff Nuttall, Horovitz frequently employed visual art and music, often jazz, in his work. He fronted the William Blake Klezmatrix band, where he played “the anglo saxophone”, an instrument he self-fashioned from a kazoo. He regarded rock stars as poetry’s troubadours, and collaborated with musicians such as Damon Albarn and Paul Weller." Douglas Field Guardian

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"Then toward the end of my teens I really started to admire Auden a great deal. Early Auden. Anne Ridler said that reading Auden made her want to write poetry in the first place. He had an idiom that seemed to be adapted to anything he did and to be able to link the ancient craft of poetry with modern experience. You must remember that I was young and ignorant and I didn't know about the modernists, and I didn't know much about Eliot then and I hadn't read Baudelaire, or I would have known that other people had written about modern experience. But Auden seemed so available. He made writing seem easy. I am very grateful to him for having, in one sense, started me off. I did feel a great need to disown him, as one does with one's earliest influences, as soon as I started to write a little more seriously. You know, it's called castrating one's father." Thom Gunn PN Review (1989)

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"Something else happens when he “hears” Ezra Pound first. In 1963, he wrote to Tony Tanner: “am now working my way through Pound, for this new course next semester. I must say, there isn’t really much there in Pound, is there?” Three years later, he tells Tanner, “With Canto 2 or 47 or the other splendid bits of Pound, I completely forget all the bullshit about Usura”, and by the 1980s, the Cantos have become a completely integral part of his imaginative resource: “We don’t think of them as disasters, do we?”, he writes admonishingly to Clive Wilmer, “We think of them as defining a new sense of form. What needs emphasizing is that the best of the Cantos are as solid as writing can get, for example, I don’t see how Canto 47 could be better, in any way.” John McAuliffe on Thom Gunn DRB

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"Mackay Brown despaired of modernity, and felt that the time-honoured worship of ‘the Word’ was now replaced by worship of ‘the Number’. He rarely left Orkney, and only visited England once, a traumatic trip to London, where the scale of the city appalled him, and he only left Scotland again to stay with his friend Seamus Heaney, in Ireland." Nigel Wheale Fortnightly Review

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"Poetry anthologies aren’t famous for being inclusive; editors make their mark by being selective, and new selections make new debates. For example, Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry (2011) collected the usual suspects (Eliot, Stevens) along with less lauded practitioners, many of whom were poets of color. Helen Vendler’s critique of the Dove anthology in the New York Review of Books was titled with a question Vendler appeared to answer in the negative: “Are these the poems to remember?” These days, Dove’s prophetic selections, like Gwendolyn Brooks and June Jordan, are the poets of the past whom many present-day practitioners prefer." Katie Peterson • Public Books

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"Stevens speaks of “the central poem” as a “huge, high harmony.” We come upon it “a little,” and then “suddenly,” in the form of “lesser poems,” by which he means actual poems and art works as well as casual perceptions and intimations, stray thoughts and observations, in the course of daily life — where your mind goes when you walk about. These “lesser poems” are parts of the whole, a grand orchestration that they together compose, and that yet exceeds them: reality in its fullness." Langdon Hammer LARB

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"“Poetry releases us into our own custody” – a persuasive idea. And what happens in Lyonesse is that, through the alchemy of poetry, solitude becomes companionable." Kate Kellaway Observer

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"Had The New Yorker accepted “Remove,” would I have written this essay? In the first place, the odds were stacked against their acceptance. When it comes to Palestine and Palestinian voices, The New Yorker, as a major American magazine of record, follows similar patterns as those of other publications." Fady Joudah • LARB

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"He fell in with writers Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Gibson, who were living near Dymock, and moved his family into a little black-and-white house a few miles away. Other poets, including Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas, joined them, and all were enchanted by the area’s woods, farms and little valleys." Liz Boulter Guardian

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"James Keery’s selection of poems by the 1940s Apocalypse poets of the Second World War and by the host of poets influenced by that movement is as startling, a true landmark of an anthology, changing the ways we will now respond to the period. As Peter Riley remarks in his fine review of the volume in The Fortnightly Review, the logic of the selection is looser than an anthology of the Apocalyptics, being more of a gathering together of over two hundred poets when writing in a certain kind of style, abstract and passionate with visionary insight expressed with Blakean clarity, doomy with the world-ending intimations of mass violence both inward and political as the Second World War loomed and burst upon the world, intricately concrete in the handling of the particulars raised into provisional being by the words." Adam Piette Blackbox Manifold

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"In addition, and just as importantly, is the realisation that the poet has brought Ireland to every corner of the globe through the universality of his work. Yeats always wrote about the mortal challenges: excavating and untangling love, success, failure, friendship, ageing and death." Susan O'Keeffe Irish Times

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"We will have to reach down into the taken-for-granted machinery of language,” writes Bronislaw Szerszynski, a scholar of technology and history, in Critical Zones. His brilliant piece explores the parallels between grammatical structures and the worldviews they express. For example, the imperfect verb tense of constructions like “You were reading this book” allows potentiality and actualization to coexist and interdepend—in other words, it creates a grammatical space where action and achievement let go some of their primacy. Similarly, the “middle voice”—between passive and active, as in “I soothe myself”—implies an immersion in action that transcends the binary of acting or being acted upon. “You are doing something, but in a way that opens you up to alterity, to the wider situation,” Szerszynski writes, and then adds this startling statement: “In such activities we become more like plants.”" Erika Howsare Boston Review

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