Michael Longley’s Angel Hill…is at once elegiac and celebratory, and achingly beautiful. Longley has honed his poetry to the bone, but how the bone does shine.

There are few contemporary poets as likeable as Michael Longley. That’s not because his poems are simply amiable, but because he looks at things hard and clearly and invites his readers to share his acts of seeing… Longley is one of few contemporary poets who can capture Homer’s spare and unrelenting humanity… The Stairwell (2014) – one of the loveliest collections of verse in the past decade… Literary historians of the future will no doubt position Longley among his fellow Irish poets Heaney and Mahon as the heirs of Yeats, and if not children of the Troubles then their wise observers.

The pleasure of reviewing becomes a privilege when presented with poets and poetry of this quality... To adopt and adapt a phrase from The Beatles...Longley in [his]communion of the spirit and the soul gift[s] us with alchemical compounds, “saviours of the human race”.

Thoughtful, elegant poems that celebrate family life, grandchildren, and a long marriage.

Unafraid to capture the intimacies and specifics of this life, Longley is also one of the very few poets able to take us, time and again, to a place as “Wild and melodious” as the birdsong he celebrates.

Lush and elegiac, delicate and muscular, melancholy and thrilling.

Quietly intense and lyrically beautiful… True greatness shows in poems in memory of his friend Seamus Heaney, in exquisite evocations of landscapes in Ireland and Scotland, and in celebrations of married love.

Angel Hill encapsulates, in rich and powerful verse, everything that it is to be Michael Longley… His poetry has peace to it, a sense of contentment... It has all the craft and meaning of someone who’s been writing poetry for fifty years. It is, at its best, timeless.

Already the virtues of a Longley poem are on display: the easy conversational manner, the unselfconscious shaping of line and stanza, the ability to sound a genuinely affectionate, unsentimental note.

Powerful… These poems are essential and urgent and shine a light on British culture in an unique and spellbinding way

Kumakanda is an essential collection from one of the UK's most exciting poets. Kayo's poetry is beautiful, thoughtful, musical and nostalgic

A wonderful debut: music, race, deracination, love and death are all woven into a compelling portrait of a young man growing up, rendered in poems that are elegant yet conversational, fluent yet profoundly skillful, touched with heart-stopping lyricism. For the reader, an initiation not to be missed

When James Baldwin described the writer's goal as stringing together sentences that were as clean as a bone, he wasn't to know that poet Kayo Chingonyi's debut collection Kumukanda would achieve exactly that

The title poem Kumukanda is elegant, eloquent and moving... For all the particularity of his subject matters and his openness in exploring them, it’s the fine and sophisticated writing that makes me return to these poems

Exceedingly powerful; by turns furious, tender and bittersweet, taking as it does the overall theme of in-betweens. Ancestry versus contemporary rites of passage. The ambiguous versus the undeniable. Who you are, and who you choose to be seen as, versus who others perceive you to be

Chingonyi is the living writer who inspires and influences me the most

A beautiful exploration of grief and boyhood... Each poem is delivered with such precision and deftness