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“... The men who first set foot on the bleached waste That is the moon saw rising near in space A planetary oasis that surpassed The homesick longings of their voyaging race: Emerald and ultramarine through a white haze Like a torn veil – as if no sand or dust Or stain of spilt blood or invading rust Corrupted it with reds, browns, yellows, greys. So visionaries have seen it: to design Transparent, luminous and, as if new-made, Cut from surrounding darkness ...”

“... All I can do is take you to the edge And throw a belvedere Out on the void, fenced in with cabled steel, So there is nothing which you need to fear – As fear you will, Like somebody marooned on a rock ledge. This is what builders do: compose a space For you to live inside And be in body. They can give no more Than wood or concrete, stone or brick provide ...”

“... The lone man hearkens to the calm voice, His expression ajar – as if the draught On his face were a breath, a friendly breath, Returning, beyond belief, from time gone by. The lone man hearkens to the ancient voice His fathers throughout the ages have heard, clear And composed, a voice that much like the green Of the pools and hills deepens at evening ...”

“... Post-War Childhoods For Takeshi Kusafuka If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace You, born in Tokyo In nineteen forty-four, Knew the simplicity Occasioned by a war. In London it was so Even in victory – In defeat, how much more. Knew it I say – and yet, Born to it, you and I, How could we in truth have known? It was the world ...”

“... Poets whose work has a kinship with that Ezra Pound are likely to be ignored. This is the case with the American poet John Peck, who, now in his late fifties, with a massive and challenging achievement behind him and the devotion of an active British publisher, is unknown not only to general readers but to those who think they know about modern poetry ...”

“... This poem, ‘Lovers’, is from an earlier selection of Petri’s poems chosen and translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri, Night Song of the Personal Shadow, as are these lines from ‘Marriage’: Your skirt is like a bag of candies, offering familiar sweetness. Do not resent him thinking he’s grasped what in fact he’s ...”

“... great contemporaries, notably Marlowe and Donne. Gunn, I believe, liked this notion, and Clive Wilmer endorses it in his excellent and too brief Introduction to The Occasions of Poetry. It is disconcerting to have to acknowledge that in Gunn’s very fine collection of poems this dimension of his writing is no longer evident. In none of these 37 ...”

“... should be ashamed of themselves. From Cambridge, from under the feet of several of them, comes Clive Wilmer’s second collection, Devotions, artfully composed to be much more than the sum of its parts, tightly metrical verses first and last, framing a central section of short-lined free verse that owes much (and very properly) to the practice of Thom ...”

“... Thanks to Clive Wilmer among others, an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, photographs and printed material bearing on Pound’s interests in ‘the visual arts’ was mounted for the Cambridge Poetry Festival on 14 June, and could be seen in Cambridge’s not sufficiently renowned Kettle’s Yard Gallery until 4 August; it will now be at the Tate from 11 September to 10 November ...”

“... into three main groups: the poet-critics (Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert Conquest), though ...”

“... their strict form, unsparing tone and plain style. ‘It came out in couplets,’ he told Clive Wilmer. ‘I’m not sure why … Once you do something that you’re pleased with, it’s not that you try to repeat it, but it points a way forward to other things.’That November, Gunn spent eight days in New York. Before setting off, he felt ...”

“... that I’m amazed I was able to achieve,’ Gunn said.) ‘Considering the Snail’ – inspired, Clive Wilmer tells us, by Paul Klee’s painting from 1924 – begins: The snail pushes through a green night, for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes, where rain has darkened the earth’s dark. He moves in a wood of ...”

“... Nor, at the other end of the spectrum, will we find poets such as Peter Robinson, Robert Wells or Clive Wilmer, or the Carcanet poets from the days when PN Review was called Poetry Nation. Denise Riley, Roy Fisher and Christopher Middleton are about all we have by way of a British avant-garde, a term which is usually taken to indicate that the poets have ...”

“... an understanding of the real risk of collapse. It can also be an effective literary strategy. Clive Wilmer, writing about Thom Gunn’s poem on his mother’s death, identifies ‘the note of reticence needed for speech to occur at all’ as being what moves the reader. In his struggles with depression, Dillon seemed to find in books the antidote to ...”