"The English poet and librettist John Birtwhistle was born in 1946 in Scunthorpe. A writer always concerned with understated craftsmanship and the quiet thrust of the unexpected....he covers a range of themes beyond the aesthetic, but this week’s poem illustrates how subtly he handles the latter."
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"Writing Devi’s poems into English—I guess I mostly believe that Benjamin was right: even the original poem is a ‘translation’ of an experience past language—made me a writer of poems nothing like the poems I myself wrote. They were poems of great despair, of great rage, emotions ordinarily thought of perhaps as ‘negative;’ certainly they were emotions and feelings that I myself was only just beginning to explore in my own work."
