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“... that poem which was a kind of farewell also to the ‘Venereal Soil’ of his first volume, Harmonium. Here is Eberhart’s ‘Opposition’, the same opposites perhaps, differently and more richly apprehended at each end, and valued differently: Wildness of nature is in Florida, Where senses open to the enveloping heat, Where no Puritan lives, persons ...”

“... small congregations in a country church will drone through them to the accompaniment of a wheezy harmonium when a decent silence would be more edifying; but it was not ever thus. In the 18th century hymns were still the province mostly of Dissenters and evangelicals. Indeed, the Wesley brothers saw them as a way of imparting sound doctrine. Bradley’s ...”

“... instrument and write her own songs, and Ornette Coleman helped her to find her way of playing the harmonium.Her relationships with a series of rock stars are the subject of titillation and myth. She records them, and her feelings, in an open, detached manner. Brian Jones, incapacitated by drugs, pursued other ways to penetrate her body: ‘I found it ...”

“... lines recall Wallace Stevens. ‘Deaf clatter’ summons up the first line of the first poem in Harmonium: ‘Every time the bucks went clattering.’ ‘Stupid glory’ echoes the ‘stupid afternoon’ in ‘Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores’. And the red rags and poppies recall the ‘red weather’ in ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’. The word ...”

“... Ulster Protestant he was, staying in with his wife and household on a Sunday to sing hymns to a harmonium. But he made more of an impact on European mores by sporting the well-cut black coat and black trousers of London’s Regency dandies, a relief to the eye among the coloured and braided uniforms, the display of male waist, calves and the limbs ...”

“... the flavour of orange/juice diminished or increased/by this or that approach to/Heidegger or Harmonium’). Ammons likes to level with you, and then to make you wonder if – or how – he’s on the level. A six-word poem entitled ‘Their Sex Life’ strips it down: ‘One failure on/Top of another’. He wants to know how much fun can be had through ...”

“... to thank his agent, his mother-in-law, his primary school teacher, and every two-bit barfly or harmonium player or cardsharp he ever had the good fortune to be cast as on the silver screen. But that isn’t Saramago’s way. He might, of course, be trying to say that his characters are personas or masks, or even heteronyms, liberating alternative ...”

“... that the emperor of ice-cream often had no clothes, and that delight in the way his poetry after Harmonium ‘juggles its terminology with such lightness and subtlety’ does not conceal its appearance on re-reading as ‘muddled, thin and repetitious’. Few poets of Stevens’s stature ‘have tossed off so many half-finished improvisations ... there seems ...”

“... in scarlet and yellow, the deacons in pink with frilly fuschia jabots, the riot of flowers, the harmonium chants, the sonorous Malayalam responses, the ceiling fans at full throttle beneath a high wooden roof. Six of the seven churches supposedly established by Thomas are extant – the one at Cranganore has disappeared – but none is very ancient in its ...”