"When I mischievously slipped a pastiche Judas poem into The Book of Judas just before it went to press, [Brendan Kennelly] phoned me on getting his copies and read the poem back to me, exploding in paroxysms of laughter at every line, immensely pleased by this betrayal in the spirit of “our” book as he called it. An editorial session at Trinity to work on a book was always punctuated with laughter, anecdotes, recitations, and Brendan wisecracks – nuggets of Kennelly or Kerry wisdom – and celebrated later with dinner on him at ‘The Troc’ a couple of blocks away. But that was never a short walk with Brendan stopping or being stopped every few yards to greet or be greeted by someone, listening to their stories, saying a poem, receiving a hug from a stranger or discreetly slipping a few euro into the hand or pocket of someone down on their luck. Everyone felt blessed by him. I know I did." Neil Astley Irish Times

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"Instead of predicting the next word in a sentence, GPT-3 would produce several paragraphs in whatever style it intuited from your prompt. If you prompted it Once upon a time, it would produce a fairy tale. If you typed two lines in iambic pentameter, it would write a sonnet." Meghan O'Gieblyn Nplusone

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"Here the crises between punctuation and beingness, that infiltrates all writing, is operating at two ends of the economy. To briefly come back to ideas of expense – a question of what we can afford to say — and to my comment on the students work (teaching them, as I was, to budget the hyperboles), the wealth of the characters in Second Pace means there’s plenty, and that one can afford the excesses of an exclamation. In Guitar! the focus is on the economical; the limited time for writing and the reduction of language (and all its available profundity!) to a single, small word, with albeit delicious syllabics." Holly Pester MAP

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"In his second collection, Nectarine, Chad Campbell stands at the threshold of hushed worlds in highly visual and sonically elegant poems. The first of the book’s three parts delivers darkly impressionistic scenes: “the half- // skinned auks look back over the isle / at what the fire cast: the outline of a man / boiling them.”" Ryo Yamaguchi Harriet

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"Sincerity, rightly deployed, can pierce the surface of a poem, as it can sometimes do the ordinary business of a life. We have come to expect it of poetry. I blame the strategic disclosures of the Confessionalist style but really it’s a useful, tried and trusted trope whenever the lyric ‘I’ feels the weight of the poem’s formal scaffolding, and threatens to buckle or warp." Vona Groarke PN Review

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"Translating early Welsh poetry is an extreme sport, requiring match fitness. I find tracing [Gillian] Clarke’s reasons for her choices fascinating, because it gives an insight into her imagination as she performs these elegies. In the end, my quibbles are a matter of taste." Gwyneth Lewis PN Review

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"Just as he took on the guise of sexual tough guy, self-deprecating poet became another of his poses: ‘I have been reading the proofs of my collected poems, 500 pages of them, TWICE, looking for errors and all I have been able to see in forty years of poetry is pretentiousness, datedness, and boredom, boredom, boredom…[I] felt about as kindly to the poetry in front of me as I were Ian Hamilton.’ As we know from earlier letters, Gunn does not think much of Ian Hamilton." Colm Toibin PN Review

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