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“... Douglas Oliver’s books have been appearing since 1969. Slim volumes published in tiny editions by marginal presses, they have escaped all but the slightest measure of attention. This may be the usual story for poets, but Oliver – a former journalist who is now teaching in Paris – is developing an unusual poetic which deserves wider interest ...”

“... of Post-Modernism and a desire for an underlying unity of self and history are also evident in Douglas Oliver’s Three Variations on the Theme of Harm. This collection incorporates the long poem ‘The Infant and the Pearl’; ‘An Island that is all the World’, a series of interesting though uneven autobiographical recollections and ...”

“... John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps that is why ...”

“... the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as her grief for her second husband, the British poet Douglas Oliver, who died in 2000.Notley’s brother, Al, who fought in Vietnam and suffered from PTSD, eventually succumbing to drug addiction, is an insistent presence in her work. Poems such as ‘White Phosphorus’ (1988), though written some years ...”

“... is an easy (and wrong) attack on your position at this stage of discussion,’ writes poet Douglas Oliver in a letter Sinclair quotes, verbatim, in White Chapell. ‘It is that you have involved yourself with a sort of demonology and that doing so was an emotional error akin to that, say, of becoming involved in sex magic.’ ...”

“... books, as are a number of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan ...”

“... which is evident, too, in the beautifully produced, unostentatious separate recent collections by Douglas Oliver and Anthony Barnett,* contributors to the Carcanet volume. ‘America’ is one acknowledged influence on these poets, though ‘America’ turns out to mean chiefly Ashbery, Olson and Pound. That there are other traditions to look to these ...”

“... gathering of Corso’s work, was published in England by Paladin – with a brief introduction by Douglas Oliver that Corso much admired. ‘The speed of mind is still there, along with its timing: how long a vowel lasts, the exact tick or fubbing of a consonant.’ But the series, indifferently promoted, never attracted a serious audience. Titles were ...”

“... MacSweeney, Wendy Mulford, John James, with decent selections of Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Douglas Oliver. And glimpses of many others, the reforgotten: John Temple, Anna Mendelssohn. It is a truth, unilaterally acknowledged (Cambridge and environs), that Raworth is the man, the only English poet the Americans read. They like, or liked in the days ...”

“... in the Marshalsea. It wasn’t the childhood he wanted, so he hadn’t spoken about it. For Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, in his clever new study, the mass of biographies can make Dickens’s life seem as inevitable as a fairy tale, his genius so self-evident that a novelist’s career was certain. But the alternative lives he might have led, as a debtor like his ...”

“... as far as the Death of Dido. Thirty years before, the late Richard Martineau, D.P. Simpson or Oliver Hunkin would have made sure that every boy in his class understood what was being taught. As a 12-year-old who hadn’t done Greek at his prep school, I vividly remember the trouble taken by the late L.S. Bethell to allow me to catch up on the mysteries of ...”

“... in his new book are ‘Peace, after Tibullus’, written in relaxed hexameters, and a poem about Oliver Plunkett, whose mummified head is kept in a glass case on the altar of Drogheda Cathedral. Trying to estimate what height he was Keeps the soul awake, like the pea under The heap of mattresses under the princess ... Such bizarre perceptions are rarely ...”

“... of Benjamin Greave, leading cloth merchant in the Lady Well district. At Making Hall Anne meets Oliver, the boss’s son, and they fall in love. The rest of the book is devoted to the story of their ill-starred affair as it develops and declines against a background of deepening crisis in the fortunes of the community. The Hawthorn Goddess is a book of ...”

“... in newspaper offices. Matters came to a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of ...”

“... ambushed, no matter what the topic, by D. H. Lawrence (73 entries), J. B. and W. B. Yeats (73), Oliver Wendell Holmes (72). A. C. Benson (67), Sherwood Anderson (64), George Santayana (61), Henry Miller (56), Emerson (55), William James (49), Nietzsche (46) and Anaïs Nin (40). These are only the familiar names; the unknown table-talkers, maxim-mongers and ...”