What others have said...

In The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-century Poetry (Macmillan/St Martin's, 1997) Jon Silkin discusses the sequence 'Little Girl Asleep' (from Talitha Cumi; Bloodaxe, 1985; reprinted in Cicadas in Their Summers; Carcanet, 1988) in chapter 7, 'Some Poets Now'.

Brief review extracts...

'There are some excellent poems in this volume [In Memoriam Milena], the best of them fed by a sense of violent forces which the spare, precise language nonetheless holds firmly in place; and there is a vein of sardonic psychological realism, too, edged with a darkly humorous wit.'                                               (Times Literary Supplement)

'... one of the British poets who is striving to bring back some of the scale and adventurousness that has been rather thin on the ground over the past twenty years... (Bridging Loans) reveals someone writing at full tilt... the product of ambitious energy... the emotional centre of his art is statement, poised and direct, with a lucidity that hurts.'                                                                               (Desmond Graham, in Stand)

'In style and subject-matter enterprisingly diverse, encompassing naturalism and fantasy, Pybus is never egocentric... his writing is charged and trenchant, that of a substantial poet.'                          (Andrew Waterman, in PN Review)

'Rodney Pybus is one of the most exciting poets I have read for a long time. His book Bridging Loans teems with ideas, with imagination and emotional vigour.'                                                                 (Carol Treloar, in 24 Hours, Sydney)

'(The Loveless Letters)... brilliantly recorded in a strenuous, convincingly muscular verse... an enterprise of admirable scope... shot through with the inspiration of a southern light.'                                                                                                                                          (John Mole, in the T.L.S.)

'Pybus' intelligence is formidable... His themes are good, his language hard and contemporary.'                                            (Douglas Dunn, in Encounter)

'The Loveless Letters is a great advance in my opinion... they add up to an extremely substantial collection.'                      (Melvyn Bragg, BBC Radio                                                                              Kaleidoscope)

'Occasionally one meets a book whose excellence is undoubted but very hard to define. This is I think true of Rodney Pybus's volume of new and selected poems Cicadas in Their Summers.'            (Fred Beake, in Stand)

'A scrupulous and admirable poet...'         (William Scammell, in The Spectator)

'Those familiar with Pybus's previous work will recognise the emergence, from the chrysalis of The Loveless Letters, of a new species: the epistolary verse novella... in this exceptional collection [Flying Blues].'                     (Patrick McGuinness, in PN Review)

'... expertise and literary skill are beautifully balanced, and nowhere more so than in the wonderfully evocative 'Pieces of Fire and Heaven'... The second half of the book [Flying Blues], 'Words of a Feather', is more remarkable still: here Pybus has taken two treacherous forms -- the verse novel and the epistolary novel -- and combined them in an 80-page fictional narrative: it looks like pretentious folly and turns out to be a stunning success.'                                                                    (Neil Powell, in Poetry Review)