The Page
poetry, essays, ideas
"Armantrout's poems nearly always enact what she describes as 'The present's chronic / revision,' the moment to moment shift of reality." Douglas Messerli on Rae Armantrout • Sibila
"Rarely does a translation so stunningly refresh the language." Carol Rumens on Lady Gregory • Guardian
"The subject of poetry, he reaffirms, is not the word but the world that people share in community." Steven Ratiner on Wendell Berry • Christian Science Monitor (1984)
"In a sense Peter was the ultimate conspiracy theorist: everything, his conversation showed, was connected. Life was both blessing and nightmare; art offered both a near-divine transcendence and a stained confession. There sometimes appears, he wrote, 'a shape to the world, / more real than time, more absolute than music'." Sean O'Brien on Peter Porter • Guardian; "That uncompromising eye for an irony – will be much missed." On Peter Porter • TLS
"Schuyler liked Shakespeare’s late comedies best, with his favorite being As You Like It. “It’s so artificial,” he wrote." Claude Peck • Rain Taxi
"Wasn’t the over-riding agent in, for example, Morrison & Motion’s Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Penguin, 1982) and Paterson & Simic’s New British Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2004), however much they are revered or disliked, the fact that they were intent on dividing rather than conquering, and isn’t this why we use them as such firm reference points today?" Simon Haworth on Identity Parade • Manchester Review; "You will almost certainly find yourself folding over the corners of pages ready for the next time you are logged into Amazon." Phil Brown on Identity Parade • Hand + Star
"He examines whether art can wield any power over death and despair, suggesting that "it can only make gestures" in the face of "real pain"." Richard Lea on Peter Porter • The Guardian ; Robert Potts • The Guardian
"Poets should know better, yet remain captivated by figurative ‘eminences’, ‘peaks’ and (worst of all) ‘career ladders’." Tim Dooley • Poetry London
"The struggle to survive was so arduous that evil as a concept hardly existed. In 'Before Life and After', one of his greatest and bleakest poems, Thomas Hardy looked back wistfully to a prehistoric age 'Before the birth of consciousness/ When all went well.' John Banville on Terry Eagleton and evil • The Irish Times
"Reflexivity, strained devotion, materiality of both language and body, colloquialisms and asides, formal attention to white space, a certain reticence, occasional nods to Nancy Drew." Anton Vander Zee on Mary Ann Samyn • AGNI
"The critic’s first responsibility is not to determine the writer’s intention—a futile quest most of the time—but to make sense of the poem. Doing so involves a combination of sympathy and skepticism." Jan Schrieber • Contemporary Poetry Review
"Larkin still, for all the inventiveness he displays in deploying adjectives, manages to come across as extraordinarily—almost ostentatiously—plainspoken." Bill Coyle • Contemporary Poetry Review
"Women poets have been almost as cursed by excessive praise as by excessive neglect." Carol Rumens on Mary Robinson • The Guardian
"It's difficult to shake the notion that Greek poetry consists of the incomparable poets of ancient times and a handful of modern masters, with a massive wasteland stretching between. 'The Greek Poets' offers a substantial challenge to that idea." Jay Parini • The Guardian
"Michael Longley once told Muldoon that he wanted to write “wee poems that move people.” “Believe it or not,” Muldoon responded, “I do too.” Plan B makes that ambition clear." Heather Clark • Harvard Review Online
"Their collectable feel and enticing cover images aside, are the poems inside actually any good?" Ben Wilkinson on four new British pamphlets • Stride
"The pursuit of the seemingly arbitrary can sometimes lay bare an unexpected design." Kathleen Rooney • Open Letters
"And yet Réda seems forever on the move: setting off, stopping, beginning afresh." Ruadhan MacCormaic • Irish Times
"There's no way to do justice to all." John Timpane on CK Williams, Sonia Sanchez, Daisy Fried and four other Philadelphia poets • Philadelphia Inquirer
"There is often something visionary or numinous like this about Ní Chuilleanáin’s work. Eliot’s remark about a poem communicating without being understood comes to mind." Matthew Sweeney • Southword
"Their work is often most subversive when both joining and satirizing that weary old, dreary old genre, poetry about poetry." Daisy Fried on Charles Bernstein • New York Times
"The metaphysics may be complex but the imagery of riding and skating are plain enough." Carol Rumens on Gerard Manley Hopkins • The Guardian
"The poet aims to reopen our eyes, to renew our faculties of perception, to dissolve preconceptions and return us to the things of this world. Philosophers, by contrast, direct our attention away from things."Troy Jollimore on HL Hix
"There actually exists no unity or uniformity among the verse being produced in what is sometimes naively seen as a homogenously ‘Islamic’ or ‘radical’ society. Furthermore, with the introduction and rapid proliferation of the Internet, the country’s younger poets have forged new approaches beyond the established ideological or artistic blocs of the past." Ali Alizadeh on Iranian poetry • Salt
"Those who dismiss British poetry as too soft-spoken may have a hearing problem." David Yezzi • New Criterion
"Because irony transfers readily from one tongue to another, it can be a translator’s ally. But the rhapsodic, the exalted, the Orphic—Rilke’s preferred modes—all too quickly turn bombastic or, worse, downright monotonous in translation." Eric Ormsby on Rilke • New Criterion
"The poet wants to explain things; at least, to express them, meaningfully. Even poets schooled in rampant modernism." Peter O'Leary on Nathaniel Tarn • Jacket
"Actually, one of my exercises, borrowed from a celebrated woman poet colleague of mine, much revered on the American workshop circuit, and no stranger to British poetry audiences, is to encourage the participants to share, in verse, however rough-hewn, the most painful, humiliating experiences of their lives. You would be surprised, really, how readily they rise, like fish to the bait." August Kleinzahler • LRB
"The tremor of recognition and the cowl of illusion are available to him. And that’s it." Ron Slate on Peter Campion • Blackbird


New poems

Leah Welborn Contrary

Carolyn Forché The New Yorker

Patrick McGuinness The Guardian

Leontia Flynn Poetry London

Charles Simic Paris Review

John Montague New Yorker

James Wagner Sidebrow

Yusuf Komunyakaa Harvard Review Online

John F Deane Southword

Adrienne Ho Burnside Review

CK Williams Hudson Review (scroll down for pdf )

Sandy Florian Sidebrow

John Stammers Poetry Review

Dan Manchester Burnside Review

Paul Muldoon Gallery

D.A. Powell Boston Review

Zach Savich Sixth Finch

Tomas Transtromer Open Letters



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The Page is edited by John McAuliffe, Vincenz Serrano and, since September 2013, Evan Jones at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. It was founded in October 2004 by Andrew Johnston, who edited it until October 2009.
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