"A totalizing project . . . one that, perhaps more realistically than his collected novels or dramas, opens the iris of history onto the great writer's formal development." --Flavorwire

"Collecting so many poems into a single volume makes it much easier to trace the patterns that are worked into Beckett's imaginative DNA. . . . For anyone interested in the evolution of his plays, Beckett's poems are essential reading. . . . Above all, we are given a bird's-eye view of the process by which he made meaningful patterns out of his 'wordshed'." --Telegraph

"[An] admirable, annotated scholarly edition. . . . Treasurable." --The London Evening Standard

"The voice we hear exemplifies the stoic injunction 'Fail again. Fail better' . . . but, more than that, it shows how beauty can be won from a vision as bleak as any other to be found in world literature." --New Statesman

"[A] sumptuously annotated edition. . . . Beckett's poetic successes, in any genre, are matters of musical cadence, of the rich interplay of sounds: they obey the Imagist prescription to compose in the rhythm of the musical phrase, not in that of the metronome. . . . Beckett's poems trace in miniature his lifelong inability, despite his best efforts, to keep silent." --The New Criterion

"Peculiar magic [and] genius imbues even the slightest lines." --Times Literary Supplement

"Toweringly important . . . funny and bleak and overflowing with laughter in the dark and melancholy joy. Featuring copious notes and a buzzing introduction, this is a work of dazzling, still-fresh brilliance." --Stuart Hammond

"Like [Beckett's] prose, with which they have so much in common, the poems are instantly striking and mysteriously persistent in the mind and even the nerves." --Derek Mahon