John Wilkinson's Effigies Against the Light for its sheer verbal inventiveness and unheard-of melodies made much contemporary poetry seem straightforwardly pedestrian.
-- Adam Phillips * The Observer *
Some of Wilkinson's poems still seem to me like white noise, like information rapidly and promiscuously flooding my attention; but I do not believe that they will necessarily continue to. Others do offer me precisely that sense of the bearing, the bearable and the beautiful; and although, for good reasons, that state is almost untranscribable, and not automatically reproducible in identical fashion for every reader, it is something one looks for in art, and is privileged to encounter.
-- Robert Potts * The Guardian *
John Wilkinson's taut, precise poems, in which lyric grace and ethical urgency move together but never comfortably mix, amount to one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary poetry.
-- Patrick McGuinness
Holidays allow both the time and energy necessary for more rewarding reading. I'm looking forward to spending time with John Wilkinson's latest volume of poetry, Lake Shore Drive; his poems are lyrical, sensual, political, challenging, intelligent. Initially alluring and mysterious, they open up gradually in surprising and provocative ways.
-- Robert Potts * The Observer: Summer Books *
John Wilkinson is a poet and critic of unfailing verve and accuracy. No voice audible today sounds a more exact imagination.
-- Simon Jarvis, University of Cambridge
John Wilkinson's a powerful and intent poet whose language is densely charged with energy-traces: it's rich with verbs, the sense of happenings, deeds, potentialities, necessities, results.
-- Roy Fisher
