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“... essays by Nuar Alsadir, Carolee Schneemann and Denise Riley, in a novel by Jean Rhys and a poem by Selima Hill. ‘I began to … believe,’ she wrote, ‘that [Hill’s poem] was speaking to me personally.’ Collins’s ‘earnest desire to consider’ these works ‘on their own terms’ sat uneasily beside her ...”

“... how her poetic personality comes across: dreamy, meditative, in the world but not quite of it. Selima Hill has some of the same ambivalence towards domesticity, accepting it as part of her experience while needing like McGuckian to escape into more enticing mythologies. But whereas McGuckian’s mythology is Classical and womanly, Venus in the ...”

“... to scandalise her reader into assent). ‘Porcine Armour Thyroid’ has more than a glint of Selima Hill (the only other poet I know who squashes the words ‘glands’, ‘armour’ and ‘pigs’ into the space of a few lines). The glands torn open in a pig’s neck look like ‘droplets of sperm/on the end of your glans’, Allen writes, before ...”

“... painting          dazzlements of unquarried marble and ‘plane-tree-dimmed. ... hill villages’. But Clampitt’s dry self-mockery usually manages to disinfect illusion. And in ‘Babel aboard the Hellas International Express’ she catches rather nicely the sprawling placelessness of travel, a fallen cosmopolitan gabble along the ...”

“... and sharply affecting; they indicate a fine poet moving onto a new plateau of achievement. Selima Hill’s previous two books have revealed an individual and distinct talent: sad, sharp, elegant, riddling and memorably cadenced. In The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness she attempts a long poem or poem-sequence charting the mental breakdown of ...”

“... Boland’s ‘The Oral Tradition’, Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Telephoning home’ and ‘Foreign’, Selima Hill’s ‘Crossing the Desert in a Pram’, Maria Jastrzebska’s ‘Bi-lingual’, and Evangeline Paterson’s ‘Dispossessed’. There is some very interesting work here, and the star poem has to be ‘Crossing the Desert in a Pram’. ...”