"In many ways ours is the Age of Narcissism, to which Poetry haplessly, for better or worse, holds up the mirror of Narcissus in crisis; self-love, self-absorption, the infantile I-my-me-itis, outsize trinkets of self-harm & self-adornment; infinite regression or righteous indignation, the welter of identity poetry. Translating Tang poetry afforded some relief; its regard for nature imparts not quietism, but a consciousness without the self, delineating some lost mode of being. " Wong May Carcanet

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"I don’t understand writers (whether Instagram poets or prose writers) who dwell on seemingly untransformed personal minutiae—who choose to quote verbatim from the grimy little grievance workshop of the ego. Of course, when you’re immured there, you can almost believe it’s the realest thing in the world and everything beyond it is less real—a dream, a projection. But it’s the other way around. The world is real and the ego a construction—a little shadow theatre, like Plato’s cave." Steven Heighton • The Walrus

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"There was a growing awareness of the troubles in Europe. I remember being uneasy at talk of General Franco and the voice of Hitler on the radio, full of hate. Our time in The Ranch ended with the beginning of the war, and a brief move to relatives in Manchester “to make bombs”. After the failure of this move and the return to real poverty in Dublin, again in reach of the Model School, I finished my primary education there. Mr Brown, one of the teachers, had an understanding with the Christian Brothers to send them any promising boys for secondary education and I was passed on to the O’Connell Schools. My father was interested but my mother was annoyed: she assumed I would leave school at 14 like everyone else and “get a job”, but she accepted. The Christian Brothers was very different from the Model School; seedy and strict, pressured totally towards success in the exams. History was a succession of wars. Studying a poem meant memorising stanzas and phrases for quotation." Thomas Kinsella Irish Times

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"Yet the translation of a poet like [Najwan] Darwish, though inviting, involves a host of challenges and dilemmas for the translator. Darwish’s poetry is still highly political, not in spite of, but because of its apparent apolitical-ness." Khaled Rajeh • Arablit

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“The arguments towards the end were passionate and thoughtful, but the choice of the judging panel is Joelle Taylor’s C+nto and Othered Poems, a blazing book of rage and light, a grand opera of liberation from the shadows of indifference and oppression.” Glyn Maxwell Guardian

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"We know (that is, we were taught) that literature is nothing but a dialogue — continuing through time. And, allegedly, we can choose our interlocutors. What interests me, perhaps, are interlocutors having speech troubles. A million blokadniki — the inhabitants (including dozens of poets) of besieged, starving Leningrad, the city where I grew up. In spite of all our efforts, we’ll never hear from most of them, they are traceless in history, voiceless." Polina Barskova • The Calvert Journal

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"For many poets jubilat provided first print publication, for many others a good place to see their work reach jubilat's faithful readers; saying a bittersweet goodbye to jubilat and saying hello, welcome, and best of luck to all who continue to support, read and make places where literary arts and art thrive." jubilat

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"One can freely feel that the Inuit imaginative sphere is faithfully and fearlessly represented. But if you were to ask of Price, “What are they like, then, the Inuit?” the answer, it seems to me, is basically “They’re just like us.” and this sense is delivered mainly in the poetical language, the lineation and diction, the “little songs” bearing their seriousness and threat on the edge of entertainment and curiosity." Peter Riley Fortnightly Review

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" In ‘Space’ [Tim] Cumming folds the infinite, the unimaginably immense and the bewilderingly abstract into the somatic experience of childbearing, another type of Bachelardian nest. Beginnings and ends slip their binaries, the unknown is made flesh. We are children of the Big Bang …Yet Cumming doesn’t allow any simple surrender to this head-spinning immensity." Julian Stannard Wild Court

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"The books, only a fraction of his personal library, with their annotations and bulging reviews of the period, create a sort of mystique of Montague’s life. Apart from his work they constitute the best description of his nature. Among the papers were cards and love-notes from old girlfriends (mainly American), manuscripts of some poems, a letter that he’d never opened from Oxford University Press offering £250 for a story, letters from several young Dublin poets, old French postal wrappers from his fastidious first wife, timetables, lists of students’ names for seminars, a note from Evelyn, dated January 1987, saying that she couldn’t collect him because her car was snowed in, souvenirs from the Rotterdam Festival 1973, a catalogue of a sculpture exhibition with an introduction by Ezra Pound. All of this is just a partial list, a selection from the life of a successful international academic poet. Of course, it was his ‘office’, his teaching library, so that the selection of books was painfully academic and pedantic. There wasn’t even one book on flowers or gardens or show business; nothing even remotely erotic or kept for pleasure." Thomas McCarthy Irish Times

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