“His poems are doubled-forests, like Magritte or early Taoist landscape paintings; you journey outside in one direction admiring the foliage, the arrangements of shadow and landscape, then suddenly, you fall inside into voracious vortices of light, fire, voice, and wisdom—the kind that shimmer behind the words. His breadth is vast and his depth is a tremulous chakra opening, burning quietly, even deliciously in your heart. A rare and perhaps the most gifted new writer on the loose.”
—Juan Felipe Herrera, 21st U.S. Poet Laureate (2015-2017)
“Neil Aitken is a true visionary poet. His instincts for the craft of poetry, its assemblage as verbal object, its locations in time and context, are startling. He is the kind of writer who makes readers want to read and poets remember why they write. He makes poetry feel young, as though the last three thousand years have passed as a single decade and there are still libraries of wonder to be written. Mr. Aitken is filling their shelves as we watch with our hands to our mouths, our cups of tea forgotten.”
—Brendan Constantine, poet & educator
“Neil Aitken is a poet of consummate grace and skill. His poems are acutely observed, unerring musically, sensual and lyrical. Filled with longing and subtle epiphanies, his poetry plumbs the depths of the human heart, and hints towards the heights of the human spirit. His writing accomplishes what Wallace Stevens suggested—that, in the best poems, “description is revelation,” for each of Aitken’s poems reveals the world anew for the reader.”
—Maurya Simon, poet, writer, & professor emerita