“... which English poetry last had in the Thirties. The way in which poets as diverse as Heaney, Muldoon, Longley, McGuckian, Carson and Mahon are to a certain degree sustained by a single symbolic world is something that poets like Armitage and Maxwell are trying to copy. In Maurice Riordan’s first collection, A Word From the Loki, the title poem reflects ...”

“... and symmetrical. It is something made, not random, illimitable scoop. (Twenty years later, Paul Muldoon will take this principle into a teasing panoptical artifice in Why Brownlee Left, Quoof and subsequent books.) There is nothing like Life Studies, and it is, therefore (poetry being poetry, and, Brodsky says, abhorring repetition), infinitely to ...”

“... this is where the question of reference needs some thought. We can go several ways on this matter. Paul Muldoon thinks, in so far as I understand his mischievous claim – he takes an implied but unmentioned cork from a wine bottle in the poem ‘All Soul’s Night’ as a connection to the city of Cork, which turn conjures up the mayor of Cork, Terence ...”

“... Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in Florida, where her father was an ...”