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“... When​ the posthumous Collected Poems of W.H. Auden appeared in 1976, Seamus Heaney wrote an appreciative review for the magazine Hibernia in which he tolda story about a Ballymena listener calling the BBC one morning in 1969, after the Northern Ireland news had given a lot of coverage to speeches by civil rights leaders the previous evening ...”

“... of the poem as a personal way of knowledge as well as a psychosomatic process that every poet’s reward must ultimately reside. Nevertheless, while it is salutary to recollect the general truth of these considerations, there remain other considerations which I believe it is proper to address with this audience, at this particular moment. For our ...”

“... Reich-Ranicki – that it comes almost as a surprise to find a barely noticed survivor: Grass the poet. As the cover of this modest Selected Poems attests, Grass was a poet before he had his colossal success in 1959 with the first of his three Danzig novels, The Tin Drum: indeed, his first publication was a book of ...”

“... or fancy the essence of a town? Can you dedicate a book to a dot – two dots – on the map? The poet and academic Robert Crawford has a soft spot for nice spots and he dedicated his 1990 collection, A Scottish Assembly, ‘to Scotland’. Some countries and some cities – like some people – openly insist on being loved, and some of them behave as ...”

“... Seeing things, Seamus Heaney’s ninth volume of new poems, is aimed squarely at transcendence. The title has a humble and practical William Carlos Williams ring to it, but that is misleading. It is better understood as having been distilled from ‘I must be seeing things’, said seriously, and with a fair amount of stress on the ‘I must ...”

“... in the work of occupation and recovery. He was well on his way to being the noted ex-communist poet, whose lyricism of the left spoke up in praise of pylons and the landing aeroplane, gliding over the suburbs, ‘more beautiful and soft than any moth’. It was in shattered Hamburg that I reviewed, in the uniform of a soldier and in a studio of the British ...”

“... of the essays is some point to which the critic wishes to ‘give salience’, rather than the poet whose name appears in the title. The poets are Gower, Marvell, Milton, Johnson, Wordsworth and Beddoes, together with a handful of 20th-century poets from A.E. Housman to Geoffrey Hill. In Wordsworth we are to attend particularly to line-endings and to ...”

“... hot food at all. The friend becomes aware that his preoccupation with his illness is excluding the poet – not a person with Aids – who is still his guest: He is, confronted by a guest so fit, Almost concerned lest I feel out of it, Excluded from the invitation list To the largest gathering of the decade, missed From membership as if the club were ...”

“... size and comparison. Norman MacCaig, who knew him well, thought MacDiarmid was an ‘egomaniac’; Seamus Heaney has described him as ‘very egocentric’. Neither of them, sensibly, thinks that an imperfect or monstrous life makes much difference to the poetry. But if poetry remains its own best defence, then what is to be gained by reminding us of the ...”

“... Alice Oswald, though she may not seem it at first, is an opinionated poet of ideas, and her poetry is ambitious in both form and scope. She writes taut poems about nature but refuses to call them ‘nature poems’. Her work is ‘full of hymns’, as Elizabeth Bishop said of her own, as well as pagan shouts and birdcalls ...”

“... it’s not for want of trying. Now in his eighties, Morgan is the most influential Scottish poet since Hugh MacDiarmid. Partly because his prose statements and his poetic praxis lay more stress on what poetry can be than on what it should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz ...”

“... and many others like it, refuses the restful incarnation in the actual which is characteristic of Seamus Heaney. It harnesses energy but does not convert it into something else. its force remains pure, does not become weight. In that respect it is closer to modern French poetry (like that of Bonnefoy or Supervielle or Frenaud) than to poetry in English. It is ...”

“... begins among the living with ‘Pearl’, a 22-poem sequence evoking a childhood love between the poet-persona and his sweetheart, the daughter of a poverty-stricken smallholding family from the ‘rain-soaked’ ‘raw-bone’ laws – the high moors around Allen-heads in Northumberland. They are two poor kids growing up in the late Fifties. She wears a ...”

“... oddly miscued by Peter Fallon as ‘still a callow youth’). Again, it is amazing that the poet who embarked on the Aeneid had seven or eight years earlier published a poem in which his desire to write an epic was suavely depreciated by Apollo, the god of poetry. At the beginning of the sixth Eclogue, Virgil’s alter ego Tityrus is about to sing of ...”

“... consoled only by the thought of posthumous fame. In 1935, however, he found a volume by a local poet in a Swansea bookshop and arranged to meet its author. Dylan Thomas could be breathtakingly inconsiderate in his treatment of Watkins. He sponged money from him and even failed to show up as best man at his wedding. Yet Watkins always idolised Thomas. He ...”