Difficulties and Exultations

What Writers and Critics Think

• Very few books of poems are compulsory page-turners, but this one is. I kept calling people into the room to share lines with them, just for the sheer pleasure of reading the words out loud.

  Ian McMillan 

• He has the ability to create complex conundrums with the most colloquial of vocabularies. His language is plain but his meaning isn't he celebrates the spontaneous in a style that is highly crafted and artful.

  Scratch

• Difficulties and Exultations presents Martin Stannard at his best a wonderfully adventurous poet whose formal inventiveness rewards us over and over again with poems of imagination and heart.

  Paul Violi