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“... Their voices rang through the winter trees: they were speaking and yet it seemed they sang, the trunks a hall of victory. And what is that and where? Though we come to it rarely, the sense of all that we might be conjures the place from air. Is it the mind, then? It is the mind received, assumed into a season forestial in the absence of all leaves. Their voices rang through the winter trees and time catching the cadence of that song forgot itself in them ...”

“... The offscape, the in-folds, secreted    Water-holes in the boles of trees, Abandoned bits, this door of water    On the wood’s floor (knock with the breath And enter a world reverted, a catacomb    Of branching ways where the roots splay): Edges are centres: once you have found    Their lines of force, the least of gossamers Leads and frees you, nets you a universe    Whose iridescent weave shines true Because you see it, but whose centre is not you:    Through the wheel of a web today I saw The wren, that mere mouse of a bird    Hurry from its hole and back again With such an energy of glancing lightness    It made me measure all the force unspied That stirred inside that bank, still    As it seemed, beside the flashing watercourse That came straight on contrary to my direction and    Out of the dereliction of an edge of woodland ...”

“... It is strange,’ Charles Tomlinson writes, ‘to have met the innovators of one’s time only when age had overtaken them.’ The innovators to whom he refers are those American poets – Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and others – whose work and moral example have been of importance to his own growth as a writer ...”

“... language is an enlightened and idealistic concept, and it informs the Clark Lectures which Charles Tomlinson delivered in Dryden’s old college, Trinity, Cambridge, in 1982. Tomlinson is an enthusiastic admirer of Dryden, whom he terms ‘the Poundian figure of his age’, and he also speaks inspiringly of the ...”

“... Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short time he was Percy Lubbock’s secretary at a villa near Lerici. In ‘Class’, he says he tried to pronounce the ‘ah’ of received English, but couldn’t and, because ‘I too visibly shredded his fineness,’ was released from the post ...”

“... gives a sense of substantial and sensitive gifts embarrassed by a strange sporadic uneasiness. Charles Tomlinson and Octavio Paz collaborated in producing ‘the first Western renga’, a Japanese name for a poem by several poets writing alternating parts. That first experiment was quadrilingual, and Airborn is a bilingual variant ‘in slow ...”

“... composed in Paris more than ten years ago by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson has recently been published here. This work, the result of five days’ collaboration in the basement of the Hôtel St Simon on the left Bank, has both oriental and occidental ancestry. The ceremonial meeting of poets to enact a ritual of ...”

“... a number of essays, directly or obliquely related, spanning almost forty years: on Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number ...”

“... admonition (especially the last sentence) is what I try to hold in mind when I give my sense of Charles Tomlinson’s poetry. Those who have been aghast at the churlish reviews of Tomlinson’s Poetry and Metamorphosis – Charles Martindale, who protested at Tom Paulin’s review ...”

“... us be thankful that a volume as serious, innovatory, large in its scope and meticulously edited as Charles Tomlinson’s Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation can still be considered a marketable commodity. This cannot have been an easy book to compile. With the small exception of George Steiner’s 1966 Penguin Book of Modern Verse ...”

“... to reinforce it, and he would probably take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly ...”

“... the pair (both provincials, of course) whom Kenner singled out as the most honourable exceptions: Charles Tomlinson, who applauded William Soutar, and Basil Bunting, who befriended MacDiarmid. Yet Tomlinson and Bunting are the true mavericks, as Kenner recognised. They are mavericks because, while acknowledging ...”

“... mood, without having his verbal brilliance: ‘the wind has eaten the faces from the angels of Charles Bridge /as if the earth had finished with us.’ One problem with the book is the frequency of her empty aphorism – ‘it was like living through something again one could not live through again’ – but she has a good eye for quotations and the high ...”

“... post World War Two. Not a very big subject, in Kenner’s view, since the whole thing stopped with Charles Tomlinson and Basil Bunting and is only spuriously ‘kept alive’ these days by the careerist machinations of people like Craig Raine and Andrew Motion. Kenner is not writing specifically for an Australian audience but he is writing for an ...”

“... Anthology, where Pound explicitly pays his dues by way of the parenthetical epigraph: ‘(King Charles)’. But in this case Pound’s adaptation is so inferior that there’s no point quoting anything but the Browning original. This is a deeper and more troubling poem than ‘Kentish Sir Byng’, because it articulates the all but suicidal sentiment of a ...”