Peter Riley: ‘Vahni Capildeo’s contrariety is an exemplary way of coping with a cultural condition which seeks to package and label experience according to unsubtle and restrictive categories. She simply says “Yes No” to it, and in the process, with the help of her multicultural resources, produces poems and prose of expansive eloquence and sometimes challenging complexity, which insist on the multi-form, Protean status of the lived realities, as well as the bare paradox-songs and stories…’

Peter Riley: ‘ I don’t just mean placid, gentle or any suchlike gloss. It’s possible to speak of a mental calm in the act of composition which opens the mind to progressive thought and enlarges its resources by overcoming the inhibitions created by anxiety. It’s a quality of the text rather than the author, though I think certain mental habits must be conducive to it. It’s not by any means incompatible with protest or even anger. This definition will not be found in any dictionary and I might have invented it, but the word “serene” could hold some hint of it.’

Peter Riley: ‘In most critical accounts of English poetry, the period called “the 1940s” has for a long time been considered a disaster. The conventional history is that all was going well enough with Auden, Spender, Day Lewis et al., and suddenly under the cover of war a race of demented poets were let loose who produced incomprehensible ravings which cannot be taken seriously for a moment. In fact the 1940s was not a disaster zone for poetry, it was a disaster zone for criticism, which was caused initially by moves in academia, especially Cambridge, to apply the established forensic expertise in locating literary frauds through the centuries to current production, thus assuming the right to intervene, with praise and blame as appropriate, in the production and reception of new poetry.’

Peter Riley: With Motion and Armitage, ‘We are really among the high-flyers…the rich and powerful of the poetry world, who preside over us from on high, secure in their top jobs, everywhere honoured and praised. There are not many of them — a dozen or so — and their careers are all much the same, though they do not all get the laureateship. Very few outside this elite bunch would ever have one of their poems mounted on the side of a building or engraved on a moorland boulder — it is a sign of their exceptional status…’

Peter Riley: ‘It might seem silly to engage in a comparison of Bugan and Lehóczky. It is certainly silly to consider them incompatible, as if you must choose one or the other. “Carillonneur” and “The House of Straw” are outwardly polar, but prolonged over-exposure to either book could make you long for the other. I’d insist in principle that in the end it is shared techniques of the poetical craft that secure the validity of both performances. ‘

Peter Riley: In surveying Caribbean poets, ‘There is a confidence of audience, a loss of psychological worry, political panic is replaced by political problems, and there is a sense of rich cultural resources across a wide range from village tales to contemporary poetry techniques.’