RaveThe Irish Independent (IRE)\"...full of...enchanting characters ... While this is a story that could be enjoyed by younger readers, that does not in any way take away from the depth of feeling within it. In that sense, it could be regarded as a crossover novel in many ways, bridging the gaps between the real and the supernatural, the young and the old, the present and the past. It\'s the tension between these opposites which gives the novel its energy ... like the best contemporary writers, she asks fundamental questions of storytelling, narration, and truth. And these are, possibly, the most important questions a novelist can pose today.\
Salman Rushdie
MixedIrish Independent (IRE)Rushdie’s language is in the main broad, his assertions general, and his assumptions sweeping. His enthusiasms are not scholarly but do have the frisson of the eclectic and sometimes the presumptuous. Whether you agree with him or not he is always engaging, mostly interesting. Part of that appeal is this side-stepping of academic rhetoric for the popular and accessible language of the opinionated enthusiast ... he wears much of his learning lightly ... Rushdie is very good on the migration of stories through culture and time ... Rushdie comes back to himself and his own writing, regardless of the subject of his essay ... One could argue that such an approach is self-serving ... it’s as a defender of free speech that Rushdie is most convincing and in illuminating the oppression many writers around the world suffer.
Carolyn Forché
RaveThe Independent (IRE)As the late great Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his Ars Poetica, poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, and under unbearable duress. It feels like Forche has done just that. She indicts herself as an \'American\' in her memoir, but she is always looking outward. There\'s a global vision to her work: in other words, a good deal of travel and an awareness of the pervasive violence of the world. Forche speaks for the underdog, the disenfranchised and the lost ... Conflict is a leitmotif throughout Forche\'s oeuvre. That being said, some of my favourite poems in this collection are those in which she accompanies fellow poet Ilya Kaminsky on her travels ... In these troubled times, poetry like Carolyn Forche\'s can lend insight, but it can also salve and elegise the present moment. Auden once wrote that poetry makes nothing happen, but in Forche\'s work, her life-long commitment to poetry and the poetic utterance, we see how poetry can transform. Both What You Have Heard Is True and In the Lateness of the World are essential reading not only for anyone interested in poetry, but in the world we live in.
