What They Said:

Robert Frost,

1954, April, 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.”
(Reproduced by permission of the Robert Frost Estate, 2017, photo courtesy of the Rauner Library at Dartmouth.)

Pablo Neruda,

1972, April
“Andrew you did made a great poem of my poem. Thanking you Pablo Neruda
in Algonquin Hotel New York, 1972”
(Copyright Atlantic Monthly, April, 1972).

Richard Wilbur,

1998, June 18,
(Copyright Richard Wilbur Estate)

Birmingham Poetry Review,

Brad Johnson,
2017, February
Excerpt from review of Overheard In A Drugstore.
“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?”

Robert Bonazzi,
2002
(From the dust jacket of Remembering Thunder).
“A poet who never presumes to know the truth but reaches out with naked honesty and wild intensity.”

John Ciardi,
1965
(From the dust jacket of Damned Ugly Children).
“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.”

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, Fall/Winter 1988-89, 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,
2015,
(From the cover of Overheard in a Drugstore).
“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.”
1991,
(From the cover of Reality Street).
“A poetic vision extraordinarily open eyed, honest and tough”

Jean Garrigue,
1966,
(From the dust jacket of Damned Ugly Children)
“Glaze’s poems are berserkly imaginative…refreshing, exciting, sans formula …their rebellious intelligence awakes you.”

Theodore Haddin
2015,
(From the cover of Overheard in a Drugstore)
“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.”

John Haines,
1991
“Unique. Swift engagement – no one quite like him.”

Maxine Kumin,
1991
“…Two of my favorite poems are his — “Trash Dragon of Shensi” and “Fantasy Street”.”

Donald Lev
2016
A Review of Overheard In a Drugstore in “Home Planet News online”.
“Andrew Glaze’s language of dance and insight travels everywhere the human psyche, the human being, hides. Sometimes he travels very deep. Deeper maybe than this reviewer has chosen to go. 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. ”
http://homeplanetnews.org/AHPNONL3-BookReview-3DonLev.html
2002
(From the dust jacket of Remembering Thunder)
“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.”

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,
2015,
(From the cover of Overheard in a Drugstore)
“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.”
2002,
(From the dust jacket of Remembering Thunder).
“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].”

The New York Times,

Peter Schjeldahl,
1978, December 17,
Excerpt from “Three Poets: The Trash Dragon of Shensi” a review in The New York Times.
“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.”
Richard Eberhart,
1966, November 13,
Excerpt from “Shock or Shut Up”, a review of Damned Ugly Children in The New York Times.
“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.”

Robert Peters,
1991,
(Written about Reality Street).
“Important book. He writes lean, finely tuned poems without obfuscation or pretentious abstraction.”

POETRY Magazine,

Robert D. Spector,
1979, January 1979, Issue #133,
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,
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.”

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,
(From the dust jacket of Remembering Thunder).
“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.”

Selden Rodman,
1966,
(From the dust jacket of Damned Ugly Children).
“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.”

Norman Rosten,
1981,
(From the cover of I Am The Jefferson County Courthouse and other poems).
“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.”
1991,
(From the cover of Reality Street).
“A serious, playful, irreverent poet, capable of setting off fireworks in the museum.”

Peter Schmitt,
2015,
(From the cover of Overheard In A Drugstore).
“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.”

Karl Shapiro
1981,
(From the cover of I Am The Jefferson County Courthouse and other poems).
“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.”

Stephen Stepanchev,
1966,
(From the dust jacket of Damned Ugly Children).
“A mature, passionate, disturbingly honest account…Andrew Glaze is one of the very best of the new poets.”

Alabama Writers Forum On-line
Barry Marks
2015, July
Review of Overheard in a Drugstore.
“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

Other Reviews of Andrew Glaze Books

• The New York Review of Books, “Jeremiads at Half-Mast” a review of “Damned Ugly Children” by Robert Mazzocco, June 20^th, 1968.
• Saturday Review, “The New Poetry of Protest” a review of “Damned Ugly Children” by Robert D. Spector, February 11, 1967.

• Poetry magazine,
  1979, #133, January, “Six Poets”, a review of “The Trash Dragon of Shensi” by Harvey Curtis Webster.
  1982, #140, September, Pg. 346, “Recent Books”, a review of “I am the Jefferson County courthouse” by J.D. McClatchy.
• Library Journal 91,
  1978, October, a review of “The Trash Dragon of Shensi”.
• Home Planet News,
  1970, #2, Summer, Vol. 1, #2, Pg. 9, a review of “The Trash Dragon of Shensi” by Martin Mitchell
  1982, #4, Fall, Vol. 8, Issue 34, Pg. 79, “Commandments”, Pg. 79 Review of Andrew Glaze by William Doreski.
  2000, Issue #46, pg. 7 review of “Someone will go on Owing” by Donald Lev.
• nycBigCityLit.com: Review of “Remembering Thunder” by Gabrielle LeMay, Jul/Aug 2003
• 5/07/24/overheard-in-a-drug-store-and-other-poems

• Birmingham Poetry Review, February, 2017, Review of “Overheard in a Drugstore”.
• The Literary Review,
  2017, March, Review of “Overheard in a Drugstore”
  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-overheard-in-a-drugstore-by-andrew-glaze/