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“... so easily avoided, however, and in this area the attempt to do so lands you in further trouble. A poet can be at once Spanish and Colombian, say: but a poet from Northern Ireland might either be proud to be British or else resent the label, though in neither case would he mind being, as Keats hoped to be, ‘among the ...”

“... In​ one of those engagingly innocent-seeming anecdotes Seamus Heaney so skilfully used in both his poems and his prose, he relates (in an essay on Patrick Kavanagh from 1985) that one of his aunts ‘planted a chestnut in a jam jar’ in the year of his birth. In due course the seedling was planted out and grew to a fine height ...”

“... prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she converts all her chosen subjects into ...”

“... Towards​ the end of 1997, Seamus Heaney wrote to his friend Derek Mahon from Magdalen College, Oxford. ‘Amigo, Here briefly, at the fall of the leaf,’ he began, archly but affably. ‘The deer-park misty, the choir angelic, the heart aswim.’ Mahon had just published The Yellow Book, a collection of long-lined, sophisticated poems steeped in Baudelaire and the fin de siècle ...”

“... deserted apart from a litter of unenticing modern disposables, hovered over by the figure of the poet himself. A tin-can is the poem’s unlikely spokesman; and yet the remarkable thing about the poem’s anthropomorphism is that Mahon can also appear dead-set against the arrogantly man-made and man-centred attitudes which possess nature and things for the ...”

“... and its content, and they deserve our attention. When Helen Vendler begins her recent book on Seamus Heaney, for example, ‘I am grateful to Seamus Heaney, first and foremost, for all the invaluable poetry and prose that he has added to the store of literature in English,’ you can be fairly sure that she’s not ...”

“... to Cresseid after she abandons Troilus. It begins with the author in a ‘doolie sessoun’ (Seamus Heaney translates this as ‘a gloomy time’, but Henryson just means the chilly start of spring). He starts to read Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, but then picks up ‘ane uther quair’ (‘a different volume’, as Heaney has it) which continues the ...”

“... poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a bride-like, much played-on Victorian guitar), and a couple of much better ones in Fuller, though not his great poem of marital sexuality, ‘The ...”

“... At the end of David Dabydeen’s poem ‘Coolie Odyssey’ (1988), the poet, deracinated by education, distance and time from the dirt-poor ancestors he is elegising, considers his British audience: congregations of the educated Sipping wine, attentive between courses – See the applause fluttering from their white hands Like so many messy table napkins ...”

“... lines were both sustenance and example to somebody hugging his own secret uneases about the way a poet should conduct himself at a moment of public crisis. At any rate, the effect of reading these invaluable translations was to string a new chord in my poetic ear. I could recognise a Yeatsian ring in some of Crichton Smith’s handling; I could hear the ...”

“... Then came the carving of a three-foot-square cake embossed with a likeness in icing of the poet’s head, his cautious smile carried on layers of sponge in blue and yellow stripes, two of the four colours of the island’s flag, blue for the sea and yellow for sunshine. St Lucia likes to remind you that it has more Nobel laureates per capita than ...”

“... poems The Thing about Joe Sullivan, probably the most likeable collection by a not always likeable poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one. Fisher has never aspired to ...”

“... to have deserted him: there may perhaps be a use for it at All Souls College, Oxford, where this poet is now a fellow. He acknowledges that, while privileged young Westerners like himself are embracing Eastern values, there is a corresponding shift in the other direction, as young Easterners aspire to the fruits of Western materialism, and he has a sharp eye ...”

“... authors and translators range from Chaucer and other English writers to non-British poets such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and W.S. Merwin. Attempts at rendering Dante into English spring from various theories of translation and ‘imitation’, all of which seem to be on display here. Use terza rima, don’t use terza rima; use rhyme, don’t use ...”

“... more truth in it than there ought to be. The Swede Tomas Tranströmer was for our time the poet of the North, the pendant – to use the obvious parallel – to Ingmar Bergman, in one of whose early films he was an extra, as a boy. Like Bergman, he gives you the days that are all night, and the nights that are all day; the interleaving of land and ...”