Peter Riley: ‘The argument about expanded translation depends, since all of it is fervently dedicated to modernisation, on what version of the modern world you are moving the poem into, and in what terms the modern world is claimed as an improvement on the classical world, and what is its language. There always is a more or less proud gaining of the present, even in the heaviest complaint about it.’

Peter Riley: ‘I think that quite a few people will still remember Seamus Heaney’s appearance at the Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1977, in which he read to a large audience as the last of three poets, preceded by Allen Fisher and Lee Harwood. He mounted the podium and began by announcing, “Now we’ll get back to the true tradition of British poetry.” At this distance it is impossible to be sure of the exact wording, whether he said “true” or “real”, “British” or “English”. I don’t cite Heaney here as a criticism of his poetry, which is not relevant. But since some of the commentary now goes so far beyond the literary as to elevate him to the status of some kind of saint, this example of gross bad manners in insulting both a fellow-reader and the organisers at a large-scale public event, and the evident smug self-satisfaction with which it was conducted (I was there at the time) could be borne in mind where appropriate. He went on to read some Wordsworth.

Peter Riley: ‘This is a stodgy review of a book interested in language as sparkling, sturdy, personal-political, risk-taking, modern-ancestral, shouting and whispering, essentially a function of the human voice raised against wrong but freely theatrical. It has on occasion something in common with the tradition of northern stand-up comedy. The title-sequence works well, mainly by the intervention through the various apertures of intriguingly inexplicable spell-like episodes, especially in the shanties.’

Peter Riley: ‘Denise Riley’s songs, sung on the most serious and heavy of occasions, offer the brightness of the singing voice worked into extended thoughtfulness as much as into the Fool’s mockery of received versions of existence.’