"Vibrant, radiant, Michael Schmidt’s poetry is steeped in the modernist tradition and questingly new. The result is a passionate discourse that is at once earthy and numinous, from which ‘flows that unusual grace which is rooted in muscle, / Which comes from the marrow and lymph, which is divine."—John Ashbery
"I don’t know anyone who is writing devotional poetry in which the self-discovery is so moving and convincing. When Michael Schmidt writes . . . we are in St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila country. And there are musical and other Miltonic references not heard since the deep songs of F.T. Prince and Robert Lowell."—Stanley Moss
Michael Schmidt is professor of poetry at Glasgow University. He is a founder and director of Carcanet Press, and an editor of PN Review. He received an O.B.E. in 2006 for services to poetry.
September 2010