"[Rane] Arroyo’s last three words of the reading were “Live. Then write.” Less than two months later, Arroyo died and left behind a prodigious backlog of work." Tony Leuzzi • Brooklyn Rail
"Little absurdities and misunderstandings amused him, such as when the local newspaper sent a photographer round for a feature on Argument of Kings.‘What sort of book is it?’ the photographer asked ‘An autobiography, I suppose’, Vernon replied. ‘Oh,’ the photographer said. ‘Who’s it about, then?’ Scannell rather enjoyed that. But actually, it wasn’t a bad question.""Daniel Hitchens on a new biography of Vernon Scannell • Oxonian Review
"My advice was: don’t publish. Wait. Read more. Write more. Get better, good enough to be actually, you know, read. Learn to respect the silence you want so badly to break. Once you don’t burn for it, you’re ready."Michael Lista • National Post
"Records, television, cinema... I can’t remember a time before. These things permeated our daily lives, as intangible as broadcasts from another planet, but in the air and on our tongues. Heaney’s description of omphalos has a lovely, persuasive telescoping of the very local and the mythic, of two cultures. Though growing up a few decades earlier, he was certainly already alert and receptive to the wider currents flowing through the local, especially in terms of radio: think of his seventh Glanmore sonnet, or ‘A Sofa in the Forties’, with its “absolute speaker” of BBC RP blowing in from over the water. In how many subtle ways must these things adjust the bonds between people and places, our identities?" Paul Farley • Poetry Review (pdf)
