First of all there are the kudos for The Orchards of Syon No less an eminence than Harold Bloom calls the book Hill rsquo s most magnificent work in a long career of splendors A N Wilson calls Hill probably the best writer alive in verse or in prose the nearest thing we have got to a poet who

For the past several hundred years, since the invention of the printing press and the dissemination of books in fact, the most frequent encounter with the poem has been with what we find on the page. But that is not the way poetry was meant to be experiencedany more, I suppose, than Scripture should

Eighteen Christmas poems by the late Joseph Brodsky Russian migr American citizen Nobel laureate and our laureate as well Eighteen poems collected and translated from the Russian by some of the best poets writing in English including Seamus Heaney Derek Walcott Richard Wilbur Anthony Hec

Once again the nightmare. The blueblack plume,

I began writing my review of John Updike rsquo s new collection of poems Americana during the week of Sept 11 and froze unable to inch forward as the ironies in a book that begins with 15 poems about seeing America from the air compounded and screamed back at me Poems with titles like ldquo C

We know Kathleen Norris now by three books all of them well received all published in the last eight years They are Dakota A Spiritual Geography 1993 The Cloister Walk 1996 and Amazing Grace A Vocabulary of Faith 1998 There have also been three books of poems small volumes published a

It should come as no secret that most readers of America don’t read the poems that appear in its pages. In fact, according to the uplifting annual or semi-annual surveys America’s editor in chief sends me, even the ads get more attention than the poems I send him. But then people read Am

From the archives: Paul Mariani on the poetry of Seamus Heaney