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“... A tear caught in a mussel shell turns to pearl, the Ancients believed. Barry MacSweeney’s The Book of Demons begins among the living with ‘Pearl’, a 22-poem sequence evoking a childhood love between the poet-persona and his sweetheart, the daughter of a poverty-stricken smallholding family from the ‘rain-soaked’ ‘raw-bone’ laws – the high moors around Allen-heads in Northumberland ...”

“... greyer than the version flourished in early snapshots – the cover of A Serial Biography, the Barry Flanagan etching from Act – but this is still the same mouth, the same disguise. The same bite. The lights are on and there is somebody at home. The speed of eye/ear/mind remains, absolutely, that of a particle accelerator. Heart is everything: the ...”

“... work at every day, all day, and then lose in the tottering piles or under the kitchen sink. Though Barry MacSweeney, John Ashbery and others drew attention to his public neglect, Moore would ensure his continued non-success by sending in reams of doggerel to editors, in which might be concealed a few bits of perfectly struck poetry, like the ...”

“... 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 Sinclair gives the ...”

“... or ‘The Coldness’ deserve to be in anybody’s anthology. Without Silkin, but also without Barry MacSweeney or Douglas Oliver – whose Penniless Politics and The Infant and The Pearl are uniquely ambitious meditations on the character of democracy – we feel that somewhere along the line we have been short-changed. Anthony Conran’s marvellous ...”