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“... Poems of science and science fiction, history and politics, love poems, comic poems, social realist or surrealist poems, dialogues and monologues, newspaper poems, Beat poems, concrete poems, sound poems and sonnets burst out of the pages of Edwin Morgan’s Collected. If he can’t do everything, it’s not for want of trying. Now in his eighties, Morgan is the most influential Scottish poet since Hugh MacDiarmid ...”

“... Kenneth Koch (pronounced ‘coke’) could do a mean impersonation of William Carlos Williams. ‘This is Just to Say’, Williams’s note asking forgiveness for eating the plums in the icebox which ‘you were probably/saving/for breakfast’ on the grounds that they were ‘so sweet/and so cold’, gets the Koch treatment in ‘Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams’: I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer ...”

“... a cashier in Cardiff. Failure to adjust to his new life, an obsession with time, and too much William Blake led to fantasies of omnipotence and to a physical assault on his old headmaster. This breakdown – and the vision of redemption that accompanied it – lies behind his later statement that ‘in my 23rd year I suddenly experienced a complete ...”

“... would be to overstate the case, Jones is allowing himself to sound less like James Joyce than William Joyce. In ‘Little Gidding’, ‘We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire.’ On 11 September 1940, Churchill spoke of a ‘fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestige of Nazi tyranny has been burnt ...”

“... Alun Lewis is usually remembered as a war poet or, more precisely, as a soldier poet. ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis. But his achievement has been hard to focus on ...”

“... in 1969, runs to almost nine hundred pages and includes more than a thousand poems. Of these William Wootten has culled 48, plus an extract from the late, long poem Winged Chariot. Each is followed by an astute and informative commentary that braids together relevant facts from de la Mare’s life, extracts from his other writings, and detailed ...”

“... like his poems, had a wilful, manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll from William Guinneach Gunn to Thompson William Gunn – Thompson was his mother’s maiden name.) It was clear, too, that he enjoyed his own style, his wit, his urge to dismiss what was dull and cautious, to celebrate what was ...”