The Page
poetry, essays, ideas
"As a poetic theory, Frost’s ‘sound of sense’, the idea of breaking irregular speech cadence over a regular line of verse, is original, as Frost was well aware. Only the sentimental chauvinist would try to give [Edward] Thomas priority. We aren’t dealing with Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. But Thomas’s champions routinely overstate their case." Craig Raine • Areté
"I remember one of the first, if not the first poem, I wrote. I was in school and it was an assignment– we had to write a Thanksgiving poem. Third or fourth grade. Mine got put on a bulletin board with large yellow and orange leaves cut out of construction paper, I remember those leaves as well as I remember the poem." Mary Ruefle • Wave Composition
"It was nearly half a century after his death before the authoritative Collecteds of Yeats began to appear. For Heaney, pending a Collected, these books are an eminently satisfying interim measure." Bernard O' Donoghue • Irish Times
"The world’s laws—of temporality, of gravity, of identity—are not so steadfast or “hard” as we may assume; in Seamus Heaney’s words, whatever is given can always be reimagined. Conor O’Callaghan takes this dictum to heart. We catch ourselves wondering if his reality is simply more interesting than ours and feel eager to experience this superabundance of sounds, sights, events, emotions, among which the poet lives." Magdalena Kay • World Literature Today
"And when I think about poems, a hole appears in the winter lake’s ice." Dorothea Grünzweig, tr Derk Wynand • Malahat Review
"The distance between the young Irish poet composing ‘Liffeytown’ and ‘The Liffey beyond Islandbridge’ and the poet of A Woman Without a Country is instructive. Her stable yet evolving example is useful to poets and readers; stage by stage she writes her way into a resistant tradition she values." Michael Schmidt on Eavan Boland • PN Review
"One of its finest qualities is Djwa’s evident awareness that her Life of P.K. Page is partly a fiction — or, to put it differently, one of many possible narratives that could be told from the facts of Page’s life. Rather than disguising this, Djwa embraces her role as storyteller — as her allegorical analogies make plain." Tina Northrup • Antigonish Review
"Newer generations of Irish writers, those reared in a private, ironic world (so private that they are outraged by the free gift of a U2 album) could never understand the massive optimism contained within [Theo] Dorgan’s unbroken sense of community. Such a belief in political community is, in a very real sense, an affront to the modern." Thomas McCarthy • Irish Examiner
"Poems of witness and protest are being written, and they are being published, and they can be extraordinarily powerful. If they seem more difficult to find than they might have been at a moment in the past, it isn’t because they don’t exist. It’s because they’re part of a much larger cultural machine in this country founded on freedoms of speech. In such context, it doesn’t seem to me that poetry has suddenly stopped mattering. It’s that a whole lot of other modes of expression matter too." Jaswinder Bolina • Poetry
"Against the horrors and brutalities of the world are set the virtues of family and friendship. [Peter] Fallon’s friend Seamus Heaney was fond of quoting from a Shakespeare sonnet: “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?”; it is a plea that is raised throughout this book." Bernard O'Donoghue • Irish Times
"But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand—the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither." DH Lawrence • Lapham's Quarterly
"‘Night Shift’ is a direct (and sceptical) allusion to a famous verse by Gu Cheng (roughly: ‘The dark nights gave me my dark eyes; I nonetheless use them to look for light’). Gu Cheng had all the time in the world, and frittered it away. He killed his wife with an axe, then hanged himself. Xu had very little time and few choices." Sheng Yun • LRB
"Shakespeare was a powerful writer who in his lifetime was poised at exactly the right moment to take advantage of the medium that the English language had only recently become. He could reach for effects that had been unavailable to the poets of both “The Seafarer” and The Canterbury Tales, and because of the particular power with which he did so, poems we think of as great, poems that harness the full capacity of the medium, tend to sound to us Shakespearean. But what we are really hearing in such poems is the medium at work; what we are hearing is the effort of a particular writer to reach for the effects that Modern English most vigorously enables. The polyglot diction of a phrase like John Ashbery’s “traditional surprise banquet of braised goat” feels idiosyncratic because it is also conventional, empowered by its author’s intimacy with his medium." James Longenbach • Poetry
“Here was a poet who made your hair stand on end,” she said. “Such independence; he caters to no school, he caters to no literary fashion. He writes about the quotidian but lifts it into the metaphysical all the time; yet he is also completely grounded.” Moya Cannon on Francis Harvey • Irish Times
"Seidel's hyperbole and excess are amplifications of the literal. Or, more precisely, they are a way of saying, with Theodor Adorno, "The barbaric is the literal." For Seidel, then, hyperbole is a means of confronting the world on its own terms, of constructing an affective vocabulary adequate to the world's barbarism. It is also therefore a means of producing personality in a specific relationship to shame." Michael Robbins • Post Road Magazine
"These are anthems to a wild, sensual “disobedience”, in which ruler and ruled, colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed are both called upon to participate in a conscious unmaking, so that a new freedom can be born." Arundhathi Subramaniam on new Indian poetry • Poetry International
"Although critics acknowledge the English and European influences on Ó Ríordáin, he is all too often placed neatly in the “Gaelic” box as one of “triúr mór” (along with Máirtín Ó Direáin and Mhac an tSaoi), who paved the way, mar dhea, for later, cooler poets." Róisín Ní Ghairbhí • Irish Times
"He may have come in for flak for inhabiting a poetic persona – street-smart, self-deprecating, no-nonsense – so fully and at times lazily that he has come to parody himself, but this selected poems proves that he has written some of the very best, most memorable poems of recent decades." Ben Wilkinson • Guardian
"[M]ost modern poets would love to be noticed if they disappeared." Thea Lenarduzzi • New Republic
"Though he has eloquent advocates, not everyone will see the appeal of Gurney’s poems, as distinct from the terrible and compelling story of his life and descent into madness." Sean O'Brien • TLS
"A Jew in the Soviet Union, a Catholic among atheists, a Ukrainian among Kazakhs, and writing poetry in Russian: such was [Regina] Derieva’s situation." Cynthia Haven • TLS
"When Art’s army arrives, it immediately enacts a regime of Anachronism. With and/or logic, it insists both on a dream interval and a fatal interval: this is not going to stop until you wake up so give up. Art performs both massive and trivial transformations—the dead are reanimated (a massive change), while a series of lyric, decorative images are daisy chained to each other with a twist of Art’s, or syntax’s, hand: pájaros become nenas como flores." Joyelle McSweeney • Lana Turner
"Seaton argues that we can best understand the history of literary criticism in terms of three traditions: the platonic, the neoplatonic, and the humanist. Seaton’s platonists—who are often not platonist in a philosophical sense—regard literature, as Plato did, as dangerous and deceitful. Poetry, fiction, and drama reinforce the prejudices of the unenlightened masses or, as we would say today, of the bourgeoisie." Gary Saul Morson • New Criterion
"The displacement caused by a change of social class, from the child of a shipyard worker to a leader of the Irish intellectual elite, as well as the great disruption caused by broken adult relationships, combine powerfully in the best work of Derek Mahon to create a poetry as magnificent as a sheet of Belfast steel and as painful as the Blues." Thomas McCarthy • Irish Examiner


New poems

Amanda Jernigan The Walrus

Jane Clarke Irish Times

Eavan Boland PN Review

Dan Disney Meanjin

Paul Muldoon Irish Times

Justin Quinn B O D Y

Lucie Brock-Broido High Chair

Anne Carson Granta

Jeramy Dodds Hazlitt

Patricia Smith Gulf Coast

Vivienne Plumb 4th Floor Journal

Crispin Best B O D Y

Kathleen Jamie New Statesman

Eva Bourke Irish Times

Maureen N McLane Paris Review

Patricia Lockwood A Public Space

Dan Beachy-Quick Salamander



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