"It displayed hundreds of personal items: his collection of ties; letters to his mother, neatly stacked in a glass case, their contents protected from voyeuristic eyes; a minute Hitler figurine, which had belonged to Larkin’s father; the hard covers and spines of Larkin’s diaries, among them one decorated with collages of scantily dressed women cut out of magazines (the insides of those diaries, which he had entrusted to Monica Jones, his longtime companion, had been shredded shortly after his death)." Yiyun Li • New Yorker

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"I’ve learnt, I think, that one of the secrets of Haitian existence is the joy of creativity and the joy of being creative through this danse de l’araignée – this joy of what Dénètem Touam Bona calls ‘l’indocilité du vivant’, the indomitableness of the creative instinct." Jason Allen-Paisant • Granta

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"My first reading of Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations happened on a train stirring eastward through Pennsylvania on a day that was spring by calendar but not in sight, the fields still sere, the sunlight thin. In the quiet car, the living hum of bodies and tasks carried on around me, each of us experiencing a communal kind of solitude, while I sat in the deep winter of the collection’s second poem. Hathaway writes, “Yesterday the river ice, till now page-blank, was annotated / by coyotes. I followed their new year letters down along the / west side of the island[.]”" Holly M. Wendt • Ploughshares

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"W. B. Yeats was surely wrong when he wrote that “[w]e make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” This suggests that poetry, in its essence, has no public dimension, that the realms of politics, of community, of shared experiences more generally, don’t belong in the genre, which is better suited to expressions of the inner spirit." Justin Quinn • LARB

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"To be sure, displacement figures in Mlinko’s work — her family is from Hungary and Belarus via Brazil; they left their home countries after World War II and arrived in the United States shortly before Mlinko’s birth — but there is something distinctly, appealingly midcentury about her witty brand of literary peregrination, both self-aware and out of place." Oona Holahan • LARB

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"It was with great shock and sadness that I learned of the passing last evening of Steven Heighton. We knew that he was ill, though we hadn’t for long. We were certain that he—and we—had more time." Dan Wells • Biblioasis

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"In “Künstlerroman,” Vuong describes being in a room of “crystal chandeliers, waiters with plates of caviar spoons, flutes of champagne” and being handed “a book, the artifact of his thinking.” He then signs it “a deliberately affected, illegible signature.” The whole poem is steeped in pitying melancholy, but it is hard to read and feel any other emotion than despair. If the poetry were better, perhaps some readers could forgive such self-indulgence. But when it comes amidst such half-hearted lines as “the man is surrounded by merry people in fine dress,” it is hard to make it to the end of the page." Francesca Peacock • Spectator World

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"For the Ukrainian-American poet, editor, and translator Boris Dralyuk, Hollywood is “a grand old dame reduced to dishabille, / her glory far too faded to restore.” Dralyuk sees the city from the perspective of immigrants and refugees, as the seat of exile and hope, connected by mythology and money to each of its surrounding communities. His individual poems may at first appear slight in their ambition, but they accumulate a vision and recover a history too few remember." David Mason • Los Angeles Review

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"If you are like me, you are always a 9-year-old standing still, all alone and yet not alone, because, look! there are so many drunks in Odessa, and they all smell amazing. And on TV, on every single news channel, a giant birthmark on Dear Leader’s forehead, shining like a miniature map of our country." Ilya Kaminsky • New York Magazine

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"This is why poetry, unlike so much else our species has mastered, cannot be copied. It’s an artifact of introspection that can only be mastered by our species. There is no superhuman way to write poems because we write them by virtue of being what a computer isn’t: human." Carmine Starnino • New Criterion

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"These days, I approach books of poems about grief with personal as well as professional interest; in 2020, my husband died in hospice care after a long illness. Reading Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality (Soft Skull Press, 2022)—a grim, whimsical, necessary oddity of a book about the sudden death of Pollari’s baby—I wanted to know: What does it feel like to lose a child at birth? How is that experience of loss different from my own?" Daisy Fried • Poetry

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"The poet Charles Wright once said he started to translate when he was in between poems, and I think that’s a really great way of putting it. In ways that’s true of me as well. There were a lot of poets, bits and pieces, that I would translate for myself and then living in Italy you just did translation for extra money. But it wasn’t until I moved here and couldn’t find any work that thanks to a series of different things, I ended up doing more and eventually ended up a translator. It still kind of surprises me." Alexander Booth • Minor Literatures

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"In contemporary America, not every poet is capable of appreciating or enjoying every kind of poetry being written. There are cliques or schools in contemporary poetry that play a game whose rules are foreign to me, and I take no enjoyment in watching them play it. Nothing punctuated or capitalized, each phrase seemingly independent from the ones before or after it, not even some phonetic principle by which these seemingly random words follow one another: Why are these words sequenced this way? I have had such thoughts when reading some of my more “experimental” contemporaries, all sorts of alien-observing-baseball thoughts." Amit Majmuder • LARB

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"Rarely was a poet so conscious of his craft, of how his thoughts were faithfully incarnated in his words, both as sense and as sound. I can’t think of any other poet who with such hubris dares us, his readers, to follow him on the sea of invention and discovery that he is himself fording for the first time, while proudly telling us to ‘wheel about’ because our puny crafts (except for a few happy ones) cannot cross the ocean he is about to cross: ‘Do not set out,’ he warns us at the beginning of Paradiso, ‘on depths where, losing me, you’ll lose yourselves.’" Alberto Manguel PN Review

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"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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" In 1965, during the ferment of the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the Vietnam War, she explains to Herko that “new times demand new words”. And while it was her former lover Jones who gained notoriety for his declaration in “Black Art” that “we want poems that kill” – and who, by the late 1960s, had changed his name to Baraka – di Prima was also forging a new radical poetry. During that same period, she sent out “Revolutionary Letters” across the US through the Liberation News Service, a syndicated counter-cultural news outlet, and these were published in a single volume in 1971. They have long been out of print and only available online. The fiftieth anniversary edition of Revolutionary Letters harks back to a period in US history when poetry, in the words of the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was an insurgent art." Douglas Field TLS

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"There’s so much writing in the world and a lot of it just seems like the same sentence." Anne Carson Interview

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"A friend said of the poem, “This one gave me shivers.” That’s exactly how I feel about it. Like all the poems and novels that affect me most, it holds up a mirror to my own doubts and indecisions. The image that I see in the mirror is completely non-flattering, but the mirror itself—the form and language of the poem—is exhilarating in its energy and poise." Edward Mendelson NYRB

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"These illustrations punctuate her energetic and (can one in this context say it?) ‘free’ translation of around half of Catullus’ poems. Some [Isobel Williams] translates several times. There are seven or so versions of the two-line poem about Catullus’ love-hate relationship with his mistress, ‘Odi et amo’. One of these sounds a bit like Ezra Pound in troubadour mode: "I hate where I do love. Perchance / Thou seek’st to know de quelle façon / [Doffs hat, strums lute-strings]./ I don’t know. It’s hurting. Here." Another sounds like a resentful adolescent: "Stuck in a hate-love trap. / ‘How does it make you feel?’ / Don’t give me that counselling crap. / The wheel has spikes. Bones snap."" Colin Burrow LRB

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"Silence is just another ableist metaphor, a mismatched name. Hearing poets load up silence with solitude and stillness, emptiness and calm." Meg Day • Poetry

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"A poem’s politics can’t be neatly deduced from its formal surface, or a poet’s politics from her chosen verse style. Claims to the contrary stem from many sources, some of them vital to the history of the art; but they are rooted, ultimately, in an American fixation on branding, packaging, and labels. The politicization of the “free” in “free verse” deserves scrutiny as an American marketing ploy: a cliché of the “free market” in the “land of the free.” The contrasting term “formalism,” applied to metrical poetry whether the poet likes it or not, deserves scrutiny as a misleading label: a term almost perfectly contrived to sound staid (“formal”) and ideological (“ism”)." Austin Allen LARB

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"The Duino Elegies has ten poems in it. Geography III is 64 pages long. I’m not so worried about disappearing that I feel I need to publish a book every two years. I also write lots of things–just not poetry–and I write every day. Each of my books of poems has been written within a certain context, within a fairly tightly defined period of time, and they reflect a certain way of thinking and art-making. When I write poems, it has to be driven by some urgency–existential, spiritual, psychological–and not just out of some sense of wanting to see my name in print." Mark Wunderlich • Tupelo Quarterly

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"This is a child’s fantasy of connection. What, then, is the writer’s? As [Victoria] Chang understands it, her family sacrificed “to build a better life, without the incisions of the past.” Her own project is not to erase those incisions—or even, as a child might hope, to heal them—but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." Kamran Javadizadeh • New Yorker

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"As impossible as it is for translation to capture all aspects of any poem, a version of Purgatorio must convey some of this mood or atmosphere. That should be doable in any language, though one would never know it by reading the American poet Mary Jo Bang’s version of Purgatorio, which is the sequel to her similar Inferno translation of a few years back." Andrew Frisardi • Plough

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"You can love Whitman’s irrepressible arias while acknowledging his limits as a poet representative of humanity. As the Earth says in his poem “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All”: “let not an atom be lost.” Carry it all, as the earth carries and absorbs the dead. Set none of Whitman down." Han Vanderhart • The Rumpus

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"Like a lot of contemporary poetry, [Kaveh] Akbar’s work seems written to be performed by Method actors. " William Logan • Tourniquet Review

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"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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"But I was already boxing and when I won the junior Ukraine championships I realised it might be a step to somewhere for me, so I decided to enter the Physical Education Institute. But I like theatre, I write poems and I learnt to play the guitar. I like different things.” Oleksandr Usyk Guardian

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"Both of these poems, in their moments, were wildly successful. Heaney won the Nobel Prize four years after Seeing Things. Rupi Kaur has four million Instagram followers, and the poem above received 184,000 likes. But other than their popularity, these two poems are not alike in any way. Rupi Kaur’s poems are not manipulations of language like Heaney’s are. They are manipulations of the images of language." Stephen Marche • Literary Hub

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"Even before Jaccottet’s passing in February of this year at the age of 95—and “passing” is an obvious euphemism, but perhaps a forgivable one in the case of a poet who so fully embodied the role of both passant (a fleeting presence, a man discreetly passing through) and passeur (the ferryman, an image often used in French to designate the translator)—there was already a poignant vulnerability in the publication of “safeguarded notes” spanning half a century." Samuel Martin • Reading in Translation

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The Page is taking a break and will return in September.

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"Perhaps the tension generated by the tasks of the presidency strengthens the tension of writing, of the imagination, of the creative drive. I write on the computer, but I also write on pieces of paper, on napkins . . . I must have dozens upon dozens of notebooks full of scribbles. I write any way I can, including on my cell phone (in the tiny square designated for "notes"). I even write when I don't have paper, pen, or computer. With the mind, with the memory. I see, for example, that I wrote this early one morning (May 14, 2020): “. . . Through this time, unmeasured even by the codé1 of Zeus and Tyche, its Creator, I dream of an agile, expert trumpeter with long hair and full curls, a slender, mulatto body, whose name, of course, I do not know, but who is certainly not the fruit of Prudentia's magic potion, much less descended from castrated Uranus . . ."" Jorge Carlos Fonseca Words Without Borders

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"In 1987, Poetry Ireland Review published an article titled, “Who is Ireland’s Most Neglected Poet – A Survey.” Though the introduction to the article states confidently that they put the question to ‘a wide range of Irish poets – of both sexes and several generations,’ while the latter appears to be true, the former is most certainly not. Out of the twenty-two respondents, precisely zero were women. Each of these respondents picked one or two poets to champion. Out of their choices, precisely zero were women. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be a woman poet at this time and feel so extraordinarily excluded from this discourse and, ironically, neglected in every possible sense." Victoria Kennefick Kenyon Review

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"But I do love research — if that was a job I would just do that, some kind of Walter Benjamin Arcades Project. And when I was researching for The Caiplie Caves in the Scottish Fisheries Museum, in little local museums and galleries and in the libraries — I can’t count the number of times I was reading and thought, “Oh, it’s all coming together. Eureka!” And then discovered someone made those connections in 1640 and there are books about it. [Laughs.] So that happens, and I probably do spend a lot of time excited over connections I’ve made between what has already been connected." Karen Solie LARB

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"But above all, it’s nature poetry that has the body and embodiment at the heart of it. Because when a black poet interrogates nature poetry in the West, it has to be done like that." Jason Allen-Paisant Spelt

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"Of course, like most old poets, Anthony could feel washed up by the remorseless tide of new writers, and neglected. That comes with the territory." Peter Scupham remembers Anthony Thwaite PN Review

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"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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"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

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"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

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"[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

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" 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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"When I was nine years old, I stood onstage in front of the whole school and recited a poem by my mother, Jean Valentine, about the end of her marriage to my father." Rebecca Chace • Yale Review

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"There is no greater tribute for a poet than for a composer to take from his work something for his own purpose. The others can keep their gaudy prizes." Marius Kociejowski PN Review

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"The Russian poet and essayist Maria Stepanova has aptly called this phenomenon “history as laughing gas,” a process by which those who feel deprived of power find vicarious dignity in the feats of their predecessors. It bears a startling resemblance to recent trends in the United States and Western Europe, where Trump supporters fly Confederate flags and Brexiteers recite Kipling, but its roots in Russia reach back to the fall of the Soviet Union." Sophie Pinkham • Harper's

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"Karen Solie is the freshest poetic voice I’ve encountered in a long while." William Logan • New Criterion

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"To have not only survived thirty-one years, as Sylvia Plath did, but to have filled those years with works of staggering beauty, with poems that irradiate generations of lives — that is a rare triumph of the spirit." Maria Popova • Brainpickings

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"How can cosmopolitan sympathies persist in times of heightened nationalism? The chapter on Isaac Rosenberg and the poetry of World War I shows that a poem like “Break of Day in the Trenches” delicately illuminates the transnational commonalities between soldiers, in defiance of political and national divisions. No-Man’s Land provokes in Rosenberg a desire for the “pleasure / To cross the sleeping green between”. Such a reading will not surprise readers of the poetry of World War I; instead, Ramazani’s achievement is to incorporate such conclusions in a broader approach to poetry." Justin Quinn • Dublin Review of Books

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"Creeley’s Selected Letters are almost uniformly uneventful and dreary." August Kleinzahler • LRB

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"A skinny man who carried a world of books within him, Adam Zagajewski was the kind of person who would offer to drop you off at your hotel after a poetry reading only to pull over midway to better focus on a conversation about poetry. He would email the next day to recommend some more poets he loved, without any of that Bloomian anxiety of influence. None of this was a performance: he was a very shy person, gracious, precise. He believed in the soul—that the soul must live in lyric poetry. That, most of all." Ilya Kaminsky • Yale Review

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"[Zoom] always puts you in a kind of hollow space. After some of these meetings, I feel very hollow in a way, because there’s really no reaction. There’s no interaction. There is no life, onstage action." Durs Grünbein • LitHub

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“I was interrogated. So was he. They said he was at the interrogation centre. But he didn’t come back, only his body.” Chaw Su Guardian

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"Long before the revelations of recent years, his poems and satires dealt with the cruelties in schools and orphanages, abuses of clerical authority, the moral issues of Catholic conscience, the plight of unmarried mothers, priestly celibacy, the bigotries of the devout, and the censorship laws." Gerard Smyth on the 125th centenary of Austin Clarke Irish Times

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'Horrex gathers and shapes her material with a light touch. From the title to the last line, her poem suggests how our concept of the “natural” has itself been eroded. She doesn’t flinch from condemnation. But the poem seems to contain a great deal of sheer pleasure in textures, places, colours, lines." Carol Rumens Guardian

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"Martina Evans is that rarest of rara avis, a poet whose work is at once serious and authentically enjoyable. As Bernard O’Donoghue has said, her poems are collectively “a miracle, for the way they combine total clarity with profundity”. Evans is working now with more brio and fearlessness than ever before. American Mules is a book of splendours and will surely count among her very best." Conor O'Callaghan The Irish Times

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"The question of speech and empire, and what language a colonial subject should use, is a constant subtext in the poems, essays, and fiction of the avant-garde modernist Yi Sang. During his short life, Yi wrote in his native Korean and his received Japanese, while experimenting with, and thus subverting, the rules of both languages. Japanese gave Yi a measure of freedom: He read the French Surrealists and Dadaists in translation and adopted their unsentimental style to process his own dislocation under empire." E. Tammy Kim • The Nation

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"While we hear plenty about what might once have been called his “personal life,” this type of candor belies any great plumbing of more private depths. There are few psychological insights, and only rarely do we see behind the mask of the cheery, light-hearted enjoyer of life. We witness Gunn habitually practicing his own advice. The writer we encounter is, above all, honest, and if what we get is surface rather than self-scrutiny, it’s a seeking, open, generous surface." Declan Ryan Poetry

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"Her essays are counterintuitive, but never contrarian. (“We must run roughshod over what threaten to become memories.”) Ryan isn’t interested in what a Robert Frost poem reveals about his politics, or the economic conditions that shaped Marianne Moore. She has never handled a hot take." Jason Guriel • Literary Hub

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"While it’s hard not to feel sometimes that all we’re doing when we write is sitting in a room talking to ourselves, what a poetry friendship can do, or has done for me at any rate, is connect the practice of the art to its beginnings in a premodern, even pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer, past when agents and publicists did not exist. It has given me a kind of freedom from the expense of spirit in a waste of shame that has accompanied the art’s professionalization —and it has shown me how poetry, even while drenched in a market economy, still has its roots in older, more intimate forms of human belonging." Alan Shapiro Triquarterly

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"Thwaite was respected and praised for the clarity, precision and depth of his verse, but the underlying pillars of his work – his marriage, his faith and his love for archaeology – gave a distinctiveness to his poems that was unique among the writing of his contemporaries." Eric Homberger Guardian

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"There are, of course, dangers in that desire to include ‘us’ with the writer’s own views. These dangers are that making us all complicit does actually become finger-pointing by any other name. It says that ‘I’ recognize these dangers and you do not. It is me who is holding up the mirror and who shifts the emotional burden on to you, the reader. Perhaps, Hirshfield recognises that danger in the next poem in the book, ‘The Bowl’." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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"Our eyes were opened and when, years later, I read Rimbaud I recognised like an augury his discovery of another entire dimension." John McAuliffe Kaleidoscope

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"Although Troubles tourism is now a vital aspect of Belfast’s economy, you’d struggle to find an elected representative who’d live within this particular attraction. To paraphrase that well-worn phrase which politicians are wont to use: is sauce for the goose ever sauce for the gander?" Scott McKendry Irish Times / Irish Journal of Anthropology

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"Returning to Proust is a little like meeting up with my former self. I’m surprised to find we like the same things. I thought she was a terrible fool. Now I go back to find out what it was like to be her." Martina Evans Irish Times

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"So a new book arrives hoping to get reviewed. It’s glossy and embellished with superlative recommendations, as they all are. I’ve never heard of the author, and I immediately think “here comes another…” But the interesting part of this story is that if, on opening the book to get some idea of the kind of writing it holds, I immediately have the impression of modernity, I automatically think it’s probably by an older poet. And so it is." Peter Riley Fortnightly Review

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