Alabama Writers Forum,
Barry Marks
2015, July
” There are few things more difficult than tempering passion and beauty with wit, whether that over-used term means “nature to advantage dressed” or clever insight. No one does it better than Mr. Glaze, and the result is a book that should be read, not merely because it is the latest from a venerable poet who was among the first to be inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. The book should be read because it is just plain good and just plain fun.”
https://www.writersforum.org/news_and_reviews/review_archives.html/article/2015/07/24/overheard-in-a-drug-store-and-other-poems
Birmingham Poetry Review,
Brad Johnson,
2017, February
“Glaze could certainly have rested on his laurels, but in this book, he risks something and confronts his American history and identity, as well as the metaphysical, in an honest way, perhaps as only a ninety-year-old can. …Glaze’s voice and approach to poetry could not be more essential. Without history, without anachronisms, without voices of the American past like Glaze’s, how can we know what today really means?”
(Excerpt from review of Overheard In A Drugstore).
Robert Bonazzi,
2002
“A poet who never presumes to know the truth but reaches out with naked honesty and wild intensity.”
(From the dust jacket of Remembering Thunder).
John Ciardi,
1965
“I have read Damned Ugly Children and I am impressed by it. Glaze has come through with a finely imagined book and a marvelously hard-muscled diction that does not for a minute hide its tenderness.”
(From the dust jacket of Damned Ugly Children).
Steven Conkle,
1988, October
Small Press Review, Vol. 20, #10, Issue 189
“Glaze is currently among the top five best poets currently active in the U.S. … A contemporary classic, one that’s going to be read long after anything you or I ever wrote is long forgotten. I’ve read A City at least 20 times now, and its freshness hasn’t even begun to fade.”
1988-89, Fall/Winter
The Journal 12, pages 84-88
“Glaze is as comfortable with an allusion to the classics as he is with the dialects of hip, and he moves easily and quickly through the range of language that lies between. …Among the top five poets currently in the U.S.”
William Doreski,
1991
“A poetic vision extraordinarily open eyed, honest and tough”
(From the cover of Reality Street).
2015
“For a long time now Andrew Glaze has challenged the literary establishment with his sharp edges and jagged metaphors. His vivid sense of place and his love of the absurd form little dramas no one else could conceive. Akin to Whitman and Hart Crane, yet differing from both, he has been an essential poet for more than sixty years.”
(From the cover of Overheard in a Drugstore).
Robert Frost,
1956, April 1956, Homer Noble Farm, Ripton, Vermont
“I should be sorry if a book of verse as genuine and readable as this couldn’t find a publisher. I have high hopes of Mr. Glaze.” (Most likely referring to poems that eventually went into Damned Ugly Children.)
(Reproduced by permission of the Robert Frost Estate. Photo courtesy of Rauner Library at Dartmouth.)
Jean Garrigue,
1966
“Glaze’s poems are berserkly imaginative…refreshing, exciting, sans formula …their rebellious intelligence awakes you.”
(From the dust jacket of Damned Ugly Children).
Theodore Haddin
2015
“When Emerson cautioned against hesitation, avarice, and following, he didn’t know how big his voice would become through the brilliant metaphors of Andrew Glaze; and here is Glaze again, (in Drugstore) at the height of the performance as it were, of his own great Shakespearean play, full of love and loss, tears of hilarity, re-morse, and joy, that have always included us in the noble South and North of his true America. Here, as elsewhere, the Glaze who sees God in the wretched of the earth can echo Mother Teresa while he sings quietly at the base of the Bodhi Tree, waiting for us.”
(From the cover of Overheard in a Drugstore)
John Haines,
1991
“Unique. Swift engagement – no one quite like him.”
Home Planet News, independent Arts Quarterly
Martin Mitchell
1979, Summer, Vol. 1, #2, Pg. 9, print version only.
A review of The Trash Dragon of Shensi.
“The prime strength of of the poems in The Trash Dragon of Shensi is their acessibilty. In fact, the nicest thing about reading Glaze’s poetry is that he speaks directly th the reader or draws him into the action of the poem.”
William Doreski
1982, Fall, Vol. 8, #4, Issue 34, Pg. 79, print version only.
A of Review of I am the Jefferson County Courthouse.
—
Donald Lev
2000, Issue #46, pg. 7 , print version only.
A review of Someone will go on Owing .
—
Gabrielle LeMay
2003, Spring, Vol. 12, #3, Issue 49, Pg. 6, print edition only
A review of Remembering Thunder
“Glows with the wit and spontaniety that have always empowered his work. But these new poems seem to be even more concise, more fully realized than ever before.”
Donald Lev
2016
Review of Overheard in a Drugstore
“Overheard in a Drugstore is a look at this mad universe by a poet who has studied it for nearly a century with a gaze that is intellectually tough, damned fearless, and always humorous. This is the work of one of the very finest poets in America, yet reading it might leave you (quietly) in stitches.”
(From Home Planet News on-line)
http://homeplanetnews.org/AHPNONL3-BookReview-3DonLev.html
The Hudson Review,
George P. Elliott
1967, Spring,
A Review of Damned Ugly Children.
Maxine Kumin,
1991
“…Two of my favorite poems are his — “Trash Dragon of Shensi” and “Fantasy Street”.”
Gabrielle LeMay
2003, July/August
nycBigCityLit.com,
A Review of “Remembering Thunder”
Donald Lev
2002
“What a treat! Andrew Glaze’s latest funny, quixotic, and very wise poetry! This new collection is a curtain-raiser on Glaze’s unique dancing lines, and his tenacity, his ambition, even, to arrive at the whole truth.”
(From the dust jacket of Remembering Thunder).
The Literary Review,
Aminah Abutayeb,
2017, March 6
“These…lines portray Glaze’s amusing personality through his use of playful language…. He uses such language throughout his poems to lighten the issues being aroused; however, this lightening-of-the-mood is never at the expense of depth.
It leads us to an intellectual form where the poet speaks about common tragic and troubling events that occur, but notices the unnoticed about those events and expresses them in luxurious thought and image.”
http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-overheard-in-a-drugstore-by-andrew-glaze/
Pablo Medina,
2002
“There are few poets today who have the sharp eye and fierce tongue of Andrew Glaze. His formal mastery, intellectual honesty, and linguistic clarity are most evident in Remembering Thunder. If you buy but a single poetry book this year, let it be [this one].”
(From the dust jacket of Remembering Thunder).
2015
“Overheard in a Drugstore confirms that Andrew Glaze is a true American poet in the vein of Whitman, Williams, and Frost. His cadences, his voice, and his vision are gleaned from decades of treading our soils. There isn’t a page that doesn’t sing, a line that doesn’t point in the direction of greatness.”
(From the cover of Overheard in a Drugstore)
The New York Times,
Richard Eberhart,
1966, November 13
(Excerpt from “Shock or Shut Up”, a review of Damned Ugly Children).
“The South now turns up a lively new poet in Andrew Glaze …. Glaze’s poems are in a dense, highly charged language without rhyme but with subtlety of diction, highly imaginative stretches of thought, with surreal overtones and pleasing confessional profundity. He also has an acrobatic intellectual wit …. Glaze’s poems are refreshing in the intellectual health they show, their direct confrontation of reality, sometimes playful, aware of depth and difficulty. He possesses a true richness of psychic perception.”
Peter Schjeldahl,
1978, December 17
(Excerpt from a review, “Three Poets: The Trash Dragon of Shensi”.)
“Andrew Glaze… is wonderful company in this book. …He is a poet I would like just to quote and quote, there are so many fine, affecting and amusing passages. If Mr. Glaze has any fault, it may be that, as I would guess, he does not write enough.”
Pablo Neruda,
1972, April
“Andrew you did make a great poem of my poem, thanking you, Pablo Neruda
in Algonquin, New York, 1972”
(Scrawled at the Algonquin Hotel, in Manhattan, after a mutual friend showed him the recent translation.)
(copyright Atlantic Monthly Magazine, April, 1972).
The New York Review of Books,
Robert Mazzocco,
1968, June 20,
“Jeremiads at Half-Mast” a combined review of Damned Ugly Children and Robert Bly’s “The Light Around the Body“.
Robert Peters,
1991
“Important book. He writes lean, finely tuned poems without obfuscation or pretentious abstraction.”
(About Reality Street).
POETRY magazine,
Harvey Curtis Webster,
1979, January, Issue #133 “Six Poets”.
(Excerpt from a review of The Trash Dragon of Shensi).
“Sometimes he is as good as Sandberg. “Fantasy Street” is … memorable. …He can be distinctively good, as in “A Choice” an unpretentiously vivid poem about Sophocles and Socrates.”
J.D. McClatchy,
1982, September, Issue #140, pg. 346, “Recent Books”.
(Excerpt from a review of I Am the Jefferson County Courthouse).
“The title poem is an exuberant Whitmanian chant, a dramatized evocation of outsized doings in the Birmingham courthouse and press room, the more vivid now because they exist only in memory. …When the oratory is checked, his writing makes its way by quirky surprises. There is immediacy and vigor here.”
1982, #140, September, Pg. 346, “Recent Books”, a review of “I am the Jefferson County courthouse” by J.D. McClatchy.
Publishers Weekly,
1999
“Balance born of conciliated tension and contradiction, characterizes Glaze’s work collected here. …Without conceit or embarrassment he purposefully inhabits the role of poet as bard and minor prophet.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-881320-91-3
Thomas Rabbitt,
2002
“With grace, good-humor and disarming clarity, the poems of Remembering Thunder demonstrate once again that the consolations of memory are not what the heart or the brain desires. Glaze is a wise poet who understand that, while it cannot recreate the lost world of the past, a poem can create a vital present out of the chaos of memory.”
(From the dust jacket of Remembering Thunder.)
Selden Rodman,
1966
“Damned Ugly Children gives promise for American poetry. Glaze is the first poet in years to speak personally as one human being to another and not as poet to poet.”
(From the dust jacket of Damned Ugly Children).
Norman Rosten,
1981
“What luck to be singing!” — so sings Andrew Glaze, and speaks for all of us, poet and listener alike, in this new collection. He is not one of your ivory tower poets, his vision and language are very much of the earth. Which means we can share the entertainment and wisdom he cheerfully offers. A poetry of wit, intelligence, and — God help us in these muddled times — clarity.”
(From the cover of I Am The Jefferson County Courthouse).
1991
“A serious, playful, irreverent poet, capable of setting off fireworks in the museum.”
(From the cover of Reality Street).
The Saturday Review, poetry quarterly,
Robert D. Spector
February 11, 1967, pg. 38-39
“The New Poetry of Protest” a review of Damned Ugly Children.
“What is the point of being a poet anyway,” he asks, “if you can’t be a kind of prophet?” But a prophet’s business begins at home, and the first confrontation is with himself. Glaze does not run away from it. … Not merely limited to poems about race, the collection expresses a realism that brings perspective to myths; that finds comfort in knowing that “this country had a father/ and that he was as crazy as my father”.
Peter Schmitt,
2015
“That a number of these poems were written by a man in his 80s and 90s would be remarkable enough. But these visionary, playful, sometimes elusive poems would be remarkable produced at any age—ebullient, musical, ever light on their (mostly nonmetrical) feet. Though Southern by birth and heritage, Glaze is every bit a Whitmanesque bard of New York City, his true spiritual home.”
(From the cover of Overheard In A Drugstore.)
Karl Shapiro
1981
“Damned Ugly Children made me a fan, and I admire the new book as much or more. But let me wish you good readers and lots of them and more from your pen.”
(From the cover of I Am The Jefferson County Courthouse).
Stephen Stepanchev,
1966
“A mature, passionate, disturbingly honest account…Andrew Glaze is one of the very best of the new poets.”
(From the dust jacket of Damned Ugly Children).
Richard Wilbur,
1998
(Copyright of Richard Wilbur Estate).
Additional Reviews have appeared in:
Library Journal 91,
1978, October, a review of “The Trash Dragon of Shensi”.
Andrew Glaze Poetry 