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“... beginnings. Certain discriminations are established from the outset. Any close resemblance between Hughes’s method and the methods of Sir James Frazer or René Girard is explained and discounted. The mere thought of Frazer prompts unavoidable and dismissive allusions to George Eliot’s Casaubon and his ‘Key to All Mythologies’, a ‘beguiling and ...”

“... rum on a verandah in Brazil, for example. No great train-robbers are mentioned by name, but Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years is a key text. Whimsy? Not at all. Again, we must read between the lines, where the real poems are taking place. Brazil suggests Hy-Brasil, the Celtic Hesperides, Atlantis and Eldorado. Muldoon is preparing the reader for the long ...”

“... Derek Mahon’s Poems 1962 – 1978 includes most of his three earlier books, to which he has added a few uncollected poems and about 35 pages of new work. Readers will discover that poems with which they thought themselves familiar have been retitled and in some cases extensively revised. Although precocious in that there are poems here which must have been written when Mahon was as young as 20 or 21, he looks as if he has been compensating for a lack of productivity by going over earlier work once again ...”

“... should be continuous in its concerns with her most ambitiously prophetic narrative. To place Ted Hughes among the Narrative Poets may seem merely paradoxical. Yet, compared with his creative peers – Larkin, Heaney, or the greatest ‘maker’ of his generation Geoffrey Hill, with his confessedly ‘deficient sense of the anecdotal’ – that is where he ...”

“... comedy and surrealism’. But these, relatively, are slight talents. McMillan’s poem ‘Ted Hughes is Elvis Presley’ is a fantasy in which Hughes, writing a poem, becomes a reincarnated Presley and starts singing to the foxes. It ends with a reference to Hughes’s poem ...”

“... race meetings [who] ... belong to the world of the RSPCA’) with the ‘urgent’ horses of Ted Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’, a poem ‘unquestionably about something’. Linked in this way, the poems make each other look slightly ridiculous – their titles alone adequately inform us what they are ‘about’ – though each on its own is a ...”

“... poets I came across were the ones everybody was reading, all published by Faber: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell and, of course, Heaney. It seems extraordinary, now, that my father had known several of them. Larkin had been his friend in Belfast (and my mother’s boss in the library at Queen’s), and, later, at the University of Essex ...”

“... it will fail to reflect the radically ‘meaningless’, indeterminate nature of our experience. Derek Walcott’s poems, informed and invigorated as many them are by a coherent ideology, don’t conform to this negative aesthetic. Their ideology, however, is a cultural version of it. Until recently, as the Barbadan poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite says, West ...”

“... Parliamentary Candidates into the strobes, to question, canvass and press the sweaty flesh. Simon Hughes of the Liberal Democrats, the local MP for Southwark and Bermondsey, regularly boasts of his clubbing credentials, gasping for credibility each time he does so. This combination of the carefree and the caring may not be Utopian, but it’s full of ...”

“... Towards​ the end of 1997, Seamus Heaney wrote to his friend Derek Mahon from Magdalen College, Oxford. ‘Amigo, Here briefly, at the fall of the leaf,’ he began, archly but affably. ‘The deer-park misty, the choir angelic, the heart aswim.’ Mahon had just published The Yellow Book, a collection of long-lined, sophisticated poems steeped in Baudelaire and the fin de siècle ...”

“... Ireland of the Twenties through to the Fifties, and respond to the fine anger in the poems of Derek Mahon, Heaney’s most talented Ulster contemporary, when, in poems like ‘Glengormley’ and ‘Ecclesiastes’, he reminds us that the awful Ulster of our youth is far from dead. With these memories we would put our trust in the objectivity of English ...”

“... indicators such as ‘presently’ (lifted, according to his friend John Spurling, from Richard Hughes). And he renders his characters’ inner voices oddly, sometimes putting thoughts in quotation marks, sometimes using free indirect style and sometimes forgetting which of the two he’s doing. From time to time this makes people think in the wrong ...”

“... on the Development of the Novel’. Thom Gunn, the Anglo-American poet, was also there; and so was Derek Walcott from the West Indies. Participating in our cogitations was an audience of several hundred who had paid for the privilege of attending (and had thus presumably relieved some of the strain on the pocket-book of the Texan). Almost all these ...”

“... sights set lower and horizons diminished. There were, and still are, alternatives to Larkin. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison are powerfully present in these 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 ...”

“... a stone or in a factual document, the search for her leads only to dreams and fantasies. Bettany Hughes attempted an archaeological quest in her Helen of Troy (2005), but was left wistfully hoping that Helen’s tomb might be discovered one day. Maguire finds traces of Helen of Troy everywhere, far beyond the poems and plays in which she is a character, but ...”