"A vigorous and welcome step outside of the easy-going, 'well crafted' and 'accessible' versification that distinguishes contemporary British poetry at the moment." Andy Brown on Tom Paulin and Paul Farley • Stride

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"One day, I hope to live in a country I haven’t imagined yet." Bhanu Kapil in conversation with Rowland Saifi • HTMLGIANT

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"I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going." Charles Simic • NYRB

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"These often messy lives were visionary, in terms of forging a counter-poetics to attenuated and restrictive doldrums. It’s like Ezra Pound. You can’t get around the Cantos—infuriated as you might feel at times—and why would you want to? You can go beyond him, possibly, or through him." Anne Waldman in conversation with Frances Richard • Bomb

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"Virtue is never transmitted. When I journeyed across America, 15 years ago, making a nuisance of myself with the figures of my early reading, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, I missed Gary Snyder. Thanksgiving was approaching and he didn’t want to disturb a family gathering. The writers I met, apart from Burroughs in his red clapboard Kansas bungalow, were in rooms in cities. They had answered too many questions, spent too many years in the echo chamber of old recordings. Snyder’s engagement was much more direct." Iain Sinclair on Gary Snyder • LRB

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"Poem by poem, this is to say, what RF Langley presents are quite singular linguistic worlds in which quite different ways emerge of answering the poet’s abiding questions." David Herd • Edinburgh Review

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"The problem, for Berlant, is the suburban fantasy 'of the endless weekend,' the 'consumer’s happy circulation in familiarity,' and the 'privilege of being bored with life' ... As a reading of Ashbery this might be right, but as an account of Marx, it isn’t. For Marx, of course, the problem is the privilege of private property, not the 'privilege of being bored.'" Todd Cronan on affect • Nonsite

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"This volume’s title, like that of his earlier Adaptations (2006), makes clear that a poem of Rilke’s or Pushkin’s is for Mahon a resource to be mined by a later poet, with which to build another poem without worrying about the fallacy of perfect translation." George Potts on Derek Mahon • Literateur

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"A translation is an x-ray, not a xerox. A poet translator is a xenophiliac." Willis Barnstone • Poets.org

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"Talking too much about yourself is like wearing your clothes inside out." Anna Kamienksa, trans. Clare Cavanagh • Poetry

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“Making love to an old man is like / Making love to a limp cornstalk blackened by fungus.” Eliza Griswold on Afghan women poets • NYT

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"The poet bloggers I once thought I knew were but status updates of their former selves. They were no longer espousing on the great poetic issues of our time; instead, they were posting pictures of food porn!" Craig Santos Perez • Poetry

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"It is the familiar suddenly perceived, and the sharpness of that perception, found somehow in language, that characterises Furious Resonance. Jones’s eye, pressed against the glass, is a keen one." John North on Terry Jones • Manchester Review

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"While poetry remains economically insignificant (Andrew Crozier compared it to hill farming), the award structure openly mimics commercialism. Like the festivals, it is a promotional machine which creates a star system in order to market a few products as exceptional." Peter Riley • Fortnightly Review

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"She offers a forensic essay—an assay, an attempt, a testing; it is a sifting of evidence, drawn from a vast cultural inheritance here mobilized with a sorrowing wit." Maureen N McLane • Poetry

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"A virtual academy of one, she dramatizes the whole 'p' crowd of our troubles: personal, political, psychological, philological, phenomenological, philosophical." Cal Bedient on Jorie Graham • LARB

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"The translations work forcefully, and it’s likely that [Jaan] Kaplinski’s pellucid style lends itself particularly well to translation, though the book only really seems to get going from The Wandering Border onwards." Peter Sirr • Poetry Ireland

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"In the current climate, with thousands of poets jostling for their place in the sun, a tepid tolerance rules." Marjorie Perloff • Boston Review

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"I believe, honestly, that the poet has an intuitive grasp of the language's history.' Cesar Vallejo, trans. Kent Johnson • The Claudius App

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"Al Alvarez does not convince us, or even really set out to convince us that [Ted] Hughes’s poem is actually better than [Philip] Larkin’s, merely that its attitudes and its manner are to be preferred." William Wooten • TLS

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"Q: How do you define home? A: Wherever the stove is." Mark Strand in conversation with Nathalie Handal • Guernica

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"Rules in poetry can be broken, but that should be done with gusto, without looking back, the way D. drives his Ferrari on the highways of Europe: so much over the speed limit that radars cannot catch him in their photo frames." Vera Pavlova • Poetry

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"Recording my life is not my aim. I hope this produces literature, i.e. distance from the self and that no one is going to ask if one card is related to a biographical event – even if that happens sometimes." Eric Suchère in conversation with SJ Fowler • 3:AM

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"I recoil from Facebook and Twitter partly because they feel to me like the Flanders household from The Simpsons, where everything is 'okeley-dokeley!' — upbeat, positive, happy. Excited to eat this ramen! with accompanying photo, not Broke-ass and alone, vodka and blow for breakfast. " Sonya Chung • The Millions

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"The root of the problem is the desperate dogma that archaic Greece was an oral society. Here I share West’s exasperation. By the late sixth century there were something like 200,000 epic and lyric verses, and early works of prose, circulating in writing." Robert L Fowler • TLS

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"I like boring things. They make such lovely holes." Vanessa Place • Poetry

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"Katharine Tynan (1859-1931) is one of a number of rather unlucky writers whose lives span the 19th and 20th centuries, but whose work, overtaken by the tsunami of modernism, now seems far away, lying becalmed somewhere in the 1890s." Carol Rumens • Guardian

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"I am used to being uninhibited on the page; but the idea of staging my thoughts in a public space has created an anxiety of a whole different order." Gwyneth Lewis on writing for theatre • Guardian

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"Reading [Frank] O’Hara, I seem to see a shimmering pavement of a city somewhere, the silhouette of a man, sun warmth on the back of my neck, the air sharp and busy on my face, a sense that everything is just beginning, and anything is possible." Max Dunbar • 3:AM

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"Abaxial, Beringia, Contig, Deskewed, Epitopes, Ferrodoxin, Glycosylation, Homeotic, Inter-genome, Jejunum, Kinesin, Lensing, Metabolome, Nucleotide, Orthologue, Palaeointensity, Quantumteleportation, Remanence, Subtelomeric, Transposon, Urease, Vanilloid, Wnt, Younger Dryas, Zeolite." Colloquium on the relationship between metaphor and science • Jacket2

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"What’s evident immediately is that the qualities that have, so far, allowed Bishop to triumph over her American contemporaries (notably Lowell) have their counterparts in Larkin, who has, so far, triumphed over his English contemporaries (notably Hughes). Bishop’s characteristic modesty, meticulousness and, even, anti-Modernism are everywhere to be found in Larkin." Paul Muldoon • NYT

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"Reading the reviews that mistook genius is not simply cold comfort for critics whom taste passed by, or an exercise in antiquarian taste. The critics who got it wrong remind us that poets in whom we now see only virtues once seemed full of vices, and that, though we may value those vices differently, sometimes it is their presence that makes the virtues virtues." William Logan • New Criterion

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"In fact, while Redgrove was able (with some ingenuity) to garner book-jacket praise from his contemporaries, it was far from universal. That lack of critical bite saw him survive many mauling." Graeme Richardson • TLS

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"Published and printed in Ireland, edited by two Irish people, it nonetheless billed itself as 'A Magazine of International Poetry': the desire was present from the outset to provide a platform for the best of Irish work alongside the best from the UK, US, Australia as well as work in translation." Justin Quinn and David Wheatley introduce Metre • Metre

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"Trains feature prominently, as do borders, journeys, landscape, memories, and solitude." Teju Cole on WG Sebald's poetry • New Yorker

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"And the corn fields today? Buried, said Margraff Turley, under a multi-storey car park." Alison Flood on Keats • Guardian

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"The map of twentieth-century Italian poetry is marked by many schools (Crepuscularism, Futurism, Hermeticism, Neorealism, Neoavant-gardism), and Brock’s introduction to the anthology describes the complicated, often overlapping contours of this map deftly. More fascinating, however, is the way the poems collected here embody this constantly shifting intersection of various linguistic and political energies—and not simply because all the great Italian moderns are represented, along with a variety of lesser-known but equally fascinating poets, some of whom write in dialect, some of whom have only recently entered middle age." James Longenbach • The Nation

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"I like that phrase of Wallace Stevens: ‘The poem is the cry of its occasion’.” Paul Durcan • Irish Times

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"The series on the work of the painter Veronica Bolay stands out and confirms Paul Durcan’s oeuvre as a poetry of encounter, of sidelong glances and exuberant strangeness." Paul Perry • Irish Times

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"He denounced the 'shouting mediocrity' of three-quarters of the poems that he published in an early private booklet, dismissing the verses as 'hopeless old friends whom you know will never get a job.'" Michiko Kakutani • NYT

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"The poem works like a heliotropic vine trained to a post--as we move our eyes downward through the poem, the poem moves upward into the air to arrive at a surprise, here 'breath’s flaked edges.' Though hard to know exactly what this means, it feels like a release from the lines that lead us to this moment, suggesting decay as much as freedom." Peter O'Leary on Gustaf Sobin • The Cultural Society

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"His has been a kind of permanent exile, dictated by temperament." Dwight Garner on Jack Gilbert • NYT

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"[T]he end product of a published [George] Oppen poem often seems unfinished, a kind of draft, as Oppen frequently re-used titles, images and lines of poems." Eric Hoffman • Culture Society

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"If most of American culture is kitsch, as [Linh] Dinh seems to believe—Vietnamese culture too—one naturally wonders what he makes of poetry (and 'poetry culture'). His title poem suggests an answer: 'As soon as I got off the boat, I stepped on a slice of cheese. / The cheese is cheesier here, the non-cheese also cheesier.'" Keith Tuma • Chicago Review

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"Had he lived, it seems likely that [Charles Donnelly's] political internationalism would have evolved, as his comparison of the ordinary magnificence of the Spanish people with those of Achill Island seems to suggest, into a poet’s rather than an activist’s vision of human universality. 'It’s two years since I’ve written verse,' he wrote to Cecil Salkeld two days before leaving for Spain, 'and here I am now writing every day. I only wish I hadn’t wasted the last two years.'" Harry Clifton • Irish Times

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"What [Marjorie] Perloff does with twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry has its model in what Susan Howe does with Dickinson and Yeats: reframing, reduplication, stenciling, permutation, parody, leaving behind a differently structured archive. The temptation is to condense her message even more radically, thus: 'All current poetry is concrete poetry.' By other means? By all means." Haun Saussy • Lana Turner

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"Beginning with the so-called 'cultural turn' of the humanities in the 1970s, the academy has gradually shifted its attention from interpretive criticism, or analysis of the formal and aesthetic qualities of literary texts, to historicized readings of the social and cultural contexts of their production." Stephen Ross • Oxonian Review

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"Publishing was Keith Waldrop’s initiative. He wanted a poetry magazine and, as we were penniless graduate students, decided the only way was to print it ourselves. The early 60s happened to be the moment when print shops all over the country dumped their letterpresses… It took a little while to learn to print, but we did." Mathew Timmons on Burning Deck • Molussus

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"Maintained by writers such as John Milton and Ben Jonson, commonplace books were personal notebooks teeming with aphorisms, quotations, and annotations. In a world without Wikipedia, the commonplace book was especially handy for argumentation, for it was a reservoir of useful wisdom that could be memorized and deployed in rhetoric and composition." Shaj Mathew • The Millions

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"Like pretty much all collections, Animal Eye doesn’t always live up to its best moments. (Not coincidentally, most poetry books also feel too long.)" Jonathan Farmer on Paisley Rekdal • Slate

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"Just as his shapes are defined by formal qualities—line and color—so her poems are formally defined by syntax, line, and internal rhyme." Ellen Davis on Laura Kasischke • Harvard Review

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"[D]o you have to know everything to write anything? It can lead to a state of mind either exhausted by the compulsion to decry every injustice, or else paralysed by a puritanical alertness to the politics of everything, a state of mind in which, as [Adrienne] Rich put it later, ‘you cannot eat an egg/ You don’t know where it’s been.’" Stephen Burt • LRB

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"She caused a stir in 1997, when she declined the National Medal of Arts in protest against the House of Representatives' vote to end the National Endowment for the Arts, stating: 'I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. ... (Art) means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.'" Meredith May • SF Chronicle "She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of 'The Feminine Mystique,' did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end." Margalit Fox • NYT

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"What happens when a poet writes a language in another language? What happens when a poet writes English in Chinese?" Stephen Ross • Wave Composition

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"Perhaps [Antonio] Tabucchi turns to his master not when he needs to be nourished or calmed, but when he needs, despite his protestations to the contrary in Requiem, to be disquieted. [Fernando] Pessoa has had an unsettling effect upon Tabucchi for many years, and made him fully conscious of the fact that there are multiple Tabucchis just as there are multiple Pessoas." Robert Gray • Eclectica

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"Keats told us to load our rifts with ore; [Andrea] Brady’s verse carries a maximum payload." Ange Mlinko • Chicago Review

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"Roy Fuller's early work, Poems (1939) and The Middle of a War (1942), shows how pervasive Auden's influence had rapidly become, but what distinguishes Fuller from many others is that Fuller had something of his own to offer, a combination of moral seriousness, political engagement and pessimism." Sean O'Brien on Roy Fuller • Guardian

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"Across the range of the four volumes he is again and again drawn to characterising debates, types and trends in lists of opposing traits: we have the 'Poet' and the 'Historian'; the 'Aristotelian' and the 'Democratic'; the world of the 'Dynamo' and that of the 'Virgin' (which must work together); the 'Primary' and 'Secondary' imaginations; the 'Frivolous' and the 'Earnest' (loosely mapping onto 'the rivalry between Ariel and Prospero' he sees in every poem); and, perhaps most appealingly, the 'Mabels' and the 'Alices'." Rhian Williams on WH Auden • PN Review

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"Constructivist poems can be as joyless as equations, but Waffles is too playful and too curious about the world for that." Paul Batchelor on Matthew Welton and others • Guardian

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"Even our snowglobes have global consequences." Justin Parks on Donna Stonecipher • Chicago Review

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"Here he is making a sly and, one may guess, significant pun, 'the need to be ill equipped' being, in the French original, 'le besoin d’être mal armé,' which Dan Gunn sees as 'perhaps an echo of the poet who made impotence so central to his oeuvre, Mallarmé.'" John Banville on Samuel Beckett • NYRB

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"John Ashbery, one of the most important American poets of the last 50 years, seems dedicated to demonstrating, at almost impossible length, that if you try you can write extremely accomplished light verse that no one on earth will want to read." Noah Berlatsky • Atlantic

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"It’s not only that Schnackenberg writes metrical verse, it’s that she is not interested in exposing its inadequacy." Katie Peterson • Boston Review

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" At the back of the book are pasted two poems she wrote, which were published in the local newspaper, the Enniscorthy Echo, and then reprinted in the Dublin newspaper the Irish Press in 1941, with a commentary by one of the editors calling the first of them "lovely" and the second "exquisite". The two poems had been published with her initials only, but it was known in the town that she had written them, and it gave her a sort of fame among her friends." Colm Toibin • Guardian

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"If No End in Strangeness is one of the grimmest books I’ve read in a long time, and it is, it’s also one of the most pleasurable, thanks to the obvious delight Taylor takes in his medium, and the skill with which he approaches it." Bill Coyle on Bruce Taylor • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"We cheat ourselves . . by constructing what I see as a false dilemma between 'formal' and 'free' verse. My sense is that the features most typically recognized as 'formal' (e.g. end rhyme, regular meter) are by no means the only formal elements of poetry, and that 'free verse' is (often? always?) every bit as formed as poetry in received forms." HL Hix in conversation with Karen Schubert • AGNI

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"The poems are lifted high into the air by a great hook and swung above a tempestuous sea." Gregory O'Brien • PN Review

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"[Kenneth] Goldsmith tells us that he regularly teaches a course of classes in which his students “are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patch-writing, sampling, plundering, and stealing”. How much the students pay for the privilege is not revealed." Stanley Wells • TLS

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"Remarkably, the inspiration for Stewart’s materialism occurred on a tempestuous crossing of the Persian Gulf in 1787--a near-fatal ordeal for which Stewart (foreshadowing Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner) was blamed by the rest of the vessel’s crew. Stewart would spend the rest of his life, Mariner-like, haranguing whomever he met with details of the vision of material oneness he had experienced on board [...] one cannot help wondering whether Godwin, by introducing Coleridge to 'Walking' Stewart in January 1800, may have brought the poet and his quasi-creation uncannily face to face." Kelly Grovier • TLS

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"Wendy has to get up at dawn and teach Emily Dickinson to 'a bunch of upper-middle class crack addicts.'” John Deming on eight Woody Allen poetry moments • Coldfront

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"Style is an ethical question, a question of limit. At the limit is that which is not ourselves. Style is a way of handling that which falls outside. The call is for a style which is where the outer is." David Herd • Almost Island

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"The poem’s critique of adjustment is accomplished through its style." Michael Scharf on John Ashbery's "A Boy" • Almost Island

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"The changes generally make Transtromer less, well, strange and more typically “poetic.”" David Orr • NYT

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"Reclaiming a more public space while maintaining the ground of experience seems like an important project." David Micah Greenberg on contemporary US 'progressive poetics' • Boston Review

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"As a second-generation modernist, [Robert] Duncan differs from his elders in taking crisis and quest for given." Jim Powell • Threepenny Review

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"The root of the word translation, which first came into English usage in the twelfth century, means 'to bear across,' specifically to carry a saint to heaven." Mark Polizzotti • Parnassus

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"He had already given us poems explaining (wrongly) why he was discarding symbolism, poems defending his practice of revising old work to the point of transformation, and poems expressing his dismay at the on-coming of age." On Yeats • Guardian archive (1928)

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"Robinson’s translation is faultless, the rush of her desire preserved in the words and syntax, so that further explanation is unnecessary, but – if only to acknowledge Pozzi’s daring – it is worth pointing out that uccello is slang for penis." Thea Lenarduzzi • TLS

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"John Burnside and Leontia Flynn are both very impressive technicians within their open forms; with Justin Quinn the formal markers are much closer to the surface." Bernard O'Donoghue • Poetry London

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"Today our poetry isn’t difficult enough, because it exists exclusively on its surface." Michael Lista on Bruce Taylor • National Post

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"The question one wants to ask about [Edwin] Morgan’s poetry is: what are we to make of its variety? DM Black • The Dark Horse

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"Faber’s enthusiasm for it verges on mania." Michael Deacon on Larkin • Telegraph

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"Is the secret hope of poets that capitalism will fall and a new order will rise in which they are valued?" Micah Mattix • American Spectator

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"But the overwhelming impression presented by [John] Beer's volume is one of travesty: a grinning juvenile rictus, a presiding spook-mask, prancing in a death-hop over the moral illusions and self-serving sentiments of a perfectly sidelined literary culture. It seems Beer is only capable of making a moral-political statement by eviscerating the pretensions of artists themselves—by revealing, by way of a mock Waste Land, the real void at the heart of poetry." Henry Gould • Critical Flame

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"The time is quick: we make the poem before your eyes. It’s like the Benihana of poetry (only with fewer flashing knives, less fire, and arguably a more enduring deliciousness). The space is tight, the distance closed almost to a point that could be uncomfortable for some: too personal or too intense. You can smell us, and we can smell you." Kathleen Rooney • Poetry

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"What attracts me most to the poetry to which I am attracted is the fact that it repels me right back—repels understanding, repels attention, and repels absorption in the way facts and opinions and narrative arcs tend to be absorbed." Jared White • Harp & Altar

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"But much of today’s most arresting poetry spurns the dream of self-sufficiency for the drama of relation." Siobhan Phillips • Boston Review

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"Not exactly Keats and Coleridge, is it?" Derek Mahon on Louis MacNeice • Carcanet

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"They were frank, and could be abrasive. They were the new people. Hobsbaum was a Cambridge graduate, a student of the great and fearsome F. R. Leavis. He taught and inspired a future Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, at Tulse Hill Comprehensive. Redgrove was already a passionate and prolific Cambridge poet. He had been a scientist, and was now a brilliantly-talented no-nonsense mystic. Bell was a little older, an unhappy West London English teacher with a love of European poetry that was requited in his own work. He had been in the army for absolutely all of the Second World War. Porter came from Brisbane, worked in a famous London bookshop, seemed to have a daunting but lightly-wom knowledge of everything, and was approachable, and was interested in you." Alan Brownjohn • TLS

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"Again, it may be too much to ask Levenson to connect montage modernism, which exploits 'the resources of speed, discontinuity, and juxtaposition,' with contemporary Hollywood movies. But I can’t resist thinking how much Apollinaire would appreciate the way 21st-century films hurtle through the heights and depths of 21st-century cities from Toronto to Tokyo, Mogadishu to Mumbai." Martha Bayles • Weekly Standard

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"Those of us who love [Larkin's] poems—with their characteristic amalgam of yearning and humour, elegy and euphony, apprehension and epiphany—and who regard Aubade as the greatest postwar lyric poem in English, do not love them to bits; not, at any rate, when those bits are dog-eared duds and rabbit-chewed flops." Dennis O'Driscoll • Irish Times

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"I want to leave the Bank, and of course the prospect of staying there for the rest of my life is abominable to me. It ought not be necessary to say this.” Lisa Levy on TS Eliot's letters • The Rumpus

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"Neither Philadelphia, where the poet lives, nor Dublin, where he was born, appears to be the locus for any of this, which could be anywhere or nowhere, a sifting and reconfiguring of a few archetypal elements." Harry Clifton on Thomas Kinsella • Irish Times

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"[The Best British Poetry 2011] is a bit like The Grand National: room for some outsiders at long odds but usually won by the favourite." Angela Topping • Stride

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"It is implausible that passengers are buying the Iliad to uphold Western civilisation, so why are they buying it?" Edward Luttwak • LRB

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"One recognises the characteristics of Hill’s late style—the defensive attempt to disarm the reader and critic by defying them, the allusions that are so prevalent as to resemble a nervous tic, and an honest attempt to rehabilitate or redeem the sloganeering of contemporary language." Bill Coyle • Oxonian Review

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"In my poetry, if the cat’s stuck behind the fridge, then I want to know what kind of fuse there is in the fridge plug and whether it wouldn’t be better rammed in the cat, not to mention a detailed chemical breakdown of the aggregate fatty acids of the whole diorama by way of segue into a stupefying speculation on the connection of credit default swaps to Congolese orgasms." Keston Sutherland in conversation with Laura Kilbride • Literateur

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"The road less traveled doesn't pay for groceries." Rachel Friedman • NY Mag

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"[B]oth [auditory and visual] aspects are inherent and vital to the existence of poetic form. Pure sound, as in sound poetry, or heavily acoustic poetry, as in spoken word, stand at one end of a spectrum; on the other end we find shaped poems, with their purely visual effects, crawling into the worm-hole of post-modern art that is concrete poetry." Ernest Hilbert • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"[Y]ou let 123 flowers bloom but you give only two or three direct light. And then say, 'Martha, see what I told you, these flowers you got at Schwartz's just don't have the stamina and inner beauty.'" Charles Bernstein in conversation with Jane Malcolm • Jacket2

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