Strategic: May 2018

Fiona Benson Wild Court

"There are also a set of protective well-tempered diatribes in reaction against the anti-Olson sentiment sparked by Tom Clark’s 1991 biography Charles Olson: Allegory of a poet’s Life, which invited critiques of the poet on personal grounds as well as antipathetic views towards his work in general. Clarke’s admonitions on Olson’s behalf are staunch in their unfailing allegiance to adhering to accuracy towards the work itself." Patrick James Dunagan 4Square Review

Henri Cole The Nation

"‘A Part Song’ opened with the line ‘You principle of song, what are you for now?’ and this ‘for’, as in Emily Berry, is as unignorable as the loved, lost bones. These poems are written in spite of the embarrassment, the gaucheness and excess of the collision between emotion and thought, pieced together through voices which say the only things possible, as well as they can." Declan Ryan The White Review

Paul Muldoon TLS

"If I’m somewhat dubious of the more overt claims of these poems–what Keats might have called “a palpable design on us”–I’m won over again and again by their urgency, their resonant cries that break historical silences with song." Danielle Chapman Yale Review

"My friend, several months before he died, asked if he could request a favour of me and, mindful of the extraordinary demands he made from time to time, I said it depended on what that favour was. ‘When I die,’ he whispered, ‘I want you to plunge a dagger into my heart.’ It would have to be a dagger, of course, a poetical blade, and not an ordinary serrated kitchen knife." Marius Kociejowski PN Review

Mallory Hasty Nonsite

"Mostly what awaits the poet is posthumous oblivion. Maybe there will be a young man in Hamburg, or Munich, or possibly Vienna, for whom my German translations will be for a while important — and might just contribute to him becoming a German language poet with Irish leanings." Matthew Sweeney Irish Examiner

Timothy Donnelly Cortland Review

"In 2007 a small selection of twenty-two poems was declassified and published in translation as Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. The vast majority of the poems, however, remains under lock in a military facility in Virginia. The reason was reported in a Wall Street Journal front-page article shortly before the publication of the collection, viz. that “poetry presents a special risk, and DOD standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language” (Dreazen 2007). Wary of secret messages hidden in the imagery, alliterations, personifications – the entire poetic dimension of language – the military refused to declassify the remaining body of literature. And because of their perceived threat to national security, the poems were translated by linguists with security clearances rather than by professional translators of poetry. Whether silenced or deformed, the Guantánamo poems make visible the degree to which fear of language and the attempt control language continue to be central elements of the war effort." Anders Engberg Pedersen boundary 2

Paul Muldoon Poets.org

"Serious and engaged critique of the kind that [Peter] Riley writes is vital to contemporary poetry, but he is mistaken in identifying the activity of the network only with the types of translation described in his review." Zoe Skoulding Poetry Wales

Henri Michaux, tr Richard Sieburth Poetry

"When people talk about my book being provocative, it’s funny to me, because it’s really a trojan horse of sentimentality. I feel like I’ve put a leather jacket on over a Laura Ashley pyjama set and got away with it." Hera Lindsay Bird Observer

Kayo Chingonyi Poetry International

"His work stretches from intimate explorations of family and marriage to considerations of nationhood and identity. But his forensic mind has paid closest attention to the struggle of the individual with the ordeals of the human predicament." Gerard Smyth Irish Times "Kinsella’s Táin transmits something of the austerity of the Irish, prickly and black as the contorted balckthorn bush, with its sudden explosions of bright blossom. It was in this language the bards expressed what we were, and in rendering it into English Kinsella has bent the language to his purpose and kept it, somehow, in the vernacular." Mary O'Malley Irish Times

Eleanor Wilner Scoundrel Time

"It is an economy for a publisher not to edit." Michael Schmidt PN Review "It’s also clear [...] that absences distort presences. If past achievement is erased, present achievement can only exist in a awed context. For any editor, that’s a case to answer." Eavan Boland Poetry Ireland

Chelsey Minnis Granta

"And so, mindful of “the Goddess Dullness squatting on our pages” (referred to elsewhere as the “daily meh”), [Leontia] Flynn breathes the new life of an entirely contemporary voice into a seemingly traditional stanzaic structure. That the elegy is not “Heaneyesque” in style testifies both to the generosity of Heaney’s example and to the sureness of Flynn’s talent." Paul Bachelor New Statesman

Thomas Kinsella PN Review

"Through [Thomas Kinsella's] New Poems 1973 and the books that followed, I learned to believe in my own reality and work from its rudiments." Harry Clifton Irish Times

"The tonal register too, slides between earnest confessional and ribald play. This makes for a dizzying, and sometimes jarring, progression. Nonetheless, I found myself unfastened by this aspect of Soho (not by its experimentation with affront), but by the discomforting force of its confessional provocation. It reminds me of the anxieties that were raised in the wake of the MeToo movement that saw survivors of sexual violence undertake public acts of self-nomination en masse. What does it mean to speak of shame? How much speaking is too much?" Nell Osborne The Manchester Review

Rachel Hadas Hudson Review

"Reading through the work of a writer like [Henri] Cole, one finds it inevitable to consider the issue of progression, or lack of it. The Confessionalist who survives and thrives to a certain age no longer finds his or her anguish as dire or newsworthy as before. In some ways the long-term conundrum of Confessionalism might be the question, How much can I do with my personal unease?" Tony Hoagland Poet Lore / Poetry Daily

DA Powell Poetry

"The reward of reading through this long book is watching the process unfold, as Plath gains agency, self-confidence, and adeptness in her lifelong project of self-fashioning. Due to the autobiographical nature of her poetry and fiction, her letters should therefore be seen not as auxiliary to her creative work, but as part of it. Yet combing any particular letter for “the truth” about Plath presents challenges, for The Letters of Sylvia Plath makes clear that she crafted different versions of herself for different correspondents, variously including and occluding details about her experiences and shifting her tone and style, depending on whom she addressed." Meg Schoerke Hudson Review