Reviews & Praise

Robert Frost
April 14, 1956
“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.”
(Referring to poems that were most likely published later in Damned Ugly Children.)
(Reproduced by permission of the Robert Frost Estate.
Photo courtesy of Rauner Library at Dartmouth.)

W.H. Auden
1960
Discussing a manuscript submitted to The Yale Series of Younger Poets competition of which Auden was a judge for Yale Press.

My brother and I have struggled to decipher Auden’s handwriting. There are a few words that still baffle us. We’ve left them blank and are open to suggestions or corrections.
In 2002, “One Day Summer” finally appeared in Remembering Thunder.
In 1964, Damned Ugly Children included “Betsy is Sleeping” (renamed “I Come In Late”) and “Morning is Unfamiliar” (renamed “The Marriage”).
In 1950, “Marine Biology” appeared in Poetry Magazine.
In 1956, “Contesa Katerina and the Duchess” appeared in New World Writing.

“Dear Mr. Glaze,
In time –sometime as everything has to be shipped back from Italy to the Yale Press — you will, I’m sorry to say, get your ms (manuscript) Interview with an Authority back.

I want to write to you direct however to say how very much I like a lot of these poems, eg. One Day Summer, Of Time Design, Betsy is Sleeping, Contesa Katerina as the Duchess, Marine Biology, Morning is Unfamiliar, Devil Pool, Debate in Heaven, Lookout Mountain, Rue Tente, Cold Pantry, etc.  Also you have a line

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. Property of the Andrew Glaze Estate).

Richard Wilbur,
1998
Discussing Someone Will Go On Owing.
“I read the ones you recommended, and that led me to explore Someone Will Go On Owing in all directions, having a good time.  Your language is always wonderfully sprightly, but without any shallow trickiness, and I enjoy your preference (in “Frog” and “Sing Song”) for life in this dusty dimension.  Thank you.”
(Copyright of Richard Wilbur Estate. Property of the Andrew Glaze Estate).


Galway Kinnell,
2008
Discussing the poem “Alleluia”.  Initially, it appeared in a magazine.  In 2015 it was included in Overheard In A Drugstore.
“Thanks for the review that your friend managed to get to me. Thank you even more for your poem “Alleluia” which I found very moving from first line all the way to the last line. I will remember your closing line: “Viva the signor of warts and turds!”  I hope you won’t let being eighty-eight stand in your way for more years of fruitful work. If I am ever in Alabama, I will look you up, provided you agree to do the same to me if you are ever in Vermont.”
(Copyright of Galway Kinnell Estate. Property of the Andrew Glaze Estate).


William Morris Meredith,
1966
Discussing Damned Ugly Children
(Copyright of William Morris Meredith Estate. Property of the Andrew Glaze Estate).

The Following are Alphabetically listed:

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).

Richard Eberhart,
1966
(Excerpts from his review of Damned Ugly Children from The New York Times.)
“The South now turns up a lively new poet in Andrew Glaze…He possesses a true richness of psychic perception.”
1978,
(Discussing The Trash Dragon of Shensi)
“Andrew Glaze has a lively apprehension of reality in poems which are fresh, direct, delightful to read and to know.”

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)
2015, November 22
Anniston Star Newspaper
https://www.annistonstar.com/life/alabama-s-poet-laureate-explores-the-straight-crookedness-of-life/article_a32837d6-8fb9-11e5-a1de-5faa7435feb6.html
A review of Overheard in a Drugstore

John Haines,
1991
(Discussing The Trash Dragon of Shensi)
“Andrew Glaze is unique, I like his enthusiasm, the swift engagement of his poems with that world in which he finds himself, at times nearly breathless, but seldom out of control.  There is 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 to 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, Home Planet News on-line
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, poetry chronicle
George P. Elliott
1967, Spring, Volume XX, #1
A Review of Damned Ugly Children.
“Andrew Glaze writes low-temperature poetry exquisitely whimsical about things that matter.”

Maxine Kumin,
1978
(Discussing The Trash Dragon of Shensi)
“Worth twice the price of admission to have between two covers two of my favorite poems by Andrew Glaze, “The Trash Dragon of Shensi” and “Fantasy Street”.”
And in a published 1998-99 interview with writer Steve Kronen :
“… and I think we should pay more allegiance to the poets who have been around for a while who are developing a solid oeuvre.  There’s Andrew Glaze, whom I first met at Bread Loaf probably 25 years ago. It baffles me that he hasn’t had the recognition that he deserves.”

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)

Walter James Miller
1978, Reader’s Almanac, WNYC-FM New York
(Discussing The Trash Dragon of Shensi).
“A Magnificent work that should become a classic before the year is out.”

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.”

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).
“Imagery and rhythms that purposely defy those who would like to see order in life and in poetry.  …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).

SELDEN RODMAN,
1997
Pages 34-35 of Rodman’s Book, Geniuses & Other Eccentrics, Photographing My Friends show a photo of Andrew Glaze and Glaze’s poem “Choices”.  Selden gave him a copy of the book with the inscription:
“Dear Andy — what do you think?”  It’s your turn to move, so maybe you’ll tell me in person. You’re the last of the writing poets—-
Always– Selden   March 10/97

Norman Rosten,
1978
“A serious, playful, irreverent poet, capable of setting off fireworks in the museum. What a relief from the blandness of the current scene.”
(Discussing The Trash Dragon of Shensi).
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).

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).

Additional Reviews have appeared in:

Library Journal 91,
1978, October, a review of “The Trash Dragon of Shensi”.