"Their surviving 459 letters, some surprisingly long (Bishop might elaborate hers over weeks, at times swearing she had written Lowell in her imagination), give us the closest view of these wounded creatures—his muscular, bull-in-a-china-shop intellect; her pained shyness and abject modesty, and a gaze like the gleam off a knife . . . The pleasures of this remarkable correspondence lie in the untiring way these poets entertained each other with the comic inadequacies of the world."—William Logan, The New York Times

"This is not poetry for the faint of heart, or for anyone wishing for a merely inspiring read; it is heartbreaking and purifying as only great poetry can be."—Craig Morgan Teicher, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"In these poems Mr. Heaney casts vigorously about through moments in his life, from childhood through restless middle age. The poems read less like nostalgia than the signs of a still-vital poet feeling along the walls of his own cranium, his own complicated history . . . [Heaney's] authority, in Human Chain, is undiminished."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“A Michael Hofmann poem is now a rare, strange, much valued item . . . One review a long time ago talked of Hofmann’s ‘rainy day voice.’ Yes, it is that, but it is a princely voice, too. Prince of nerves and manners, precise poet of desolations and furies—Hofmann’s rainy day is as authentic and valuable as the weather we go out in.”—George Szirtes, The Guardian

"One of our major poets, one who continues to find a way to define the ways we experience and imagine our language."—Keith Taylor, The Southern Review 

"Characters come fully and movingly to life in Walcott's hands; black and white are treated with equal understanding and sympathy as they go their complicated ways . . . Wit and verbal play . . . enliven every page."—Bernard Knox, The New York Review of Books

“Wheeler’s poetry doesn’t shy from difficulty, complexity or confusion . . . Wheeler holds a door open for the jumble of history: Dutch painting and British theology room with old riddles and New York Times articles . . . Economics and emotion face each other across a charged field; stuff gathers in the middle, glittery as a sack of diamonds.”—Joshua Clover, The New York Times Book Review

Reissued with an introduction by W. S. Mervin, this book stands as a perfect representation of Berryman’s originality and technical brilliance—for instance his understanding of the nature and limits of the American epic poem.

"Just as art has impelled the poet through the remaking of his self, so Bidart has remade the tradition of poetry in English. Star Dust is not merely 'about' the desire to create: It exists as a superb embodiment of that urge . . . No living poet writes with Bidart's fusion of emotional ferocity and formal exactitude, of grand ambition and creaturely attentiveness. This is his strongest book."—Peter Campion, The Boston Globe

“Full of rage even when most melancholy or sweet, [Bidart’s] voice leaps off the page toward his subjects, and toward the reader . . . Grand poetic ambition, at its best, can make us feel that that which challenges the glory-seeking poet also challenges the ordinary life. In lucid moments of this wonderful book, Bidart accomplishes this feat.”—Katie Peterson, Chicago Tribune