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[Her] rhymes… build up echoes that ripple in the air, striking through complacency and stasis

— Linda France, Mslexia

Of late, it seems that a poet’s least reference to science is reason for automatic praise in the glorification of all things interdisciplinary, yet what makes scientific discourse apt here is the book’s pervasive engagement with problems of perception, causation, and narrative

— Carrie Etter, The Times Literary Supplement

A profound sense of human fragility… these are poems that reward the close listening on which they themselves depend

— Olivia Cole, Magma

Copus has great leaping complex visions… But she’s nevertheless reliably attached to reality, to the oddness, the innocent simplicity of things, especially as they relate to humans. … Her poems are structured with immense quiet subtlety… She is particularly good on love, and how it operates

— Rosie Bailey, Envoi

Poems that, for all their formal dexterity, fairly tremble with suppressed emotion… Copus is a poet of relationships, meditating in carefully crafted poems upon their trivial details and their grand designs with equal authority, and offering some important insights into how we make our ways through what Stephen Hawking calls “the dark stuff” of the universe

— John Sears, Pop Matters

Our eventual winner, Julia Copus, had the “read-it-again” factor in spades. It was Simon Armitage who kept bringing us gently back to this poem. Every time, we found something new, something strange
[on the judging of the National Poetry Competition 2002]

— Suzi Feay, The Independent on Sunday

Happily, Bloodaxe is still doing what it does best. Julia Copus’s In Defence of Adultery is the imprint’s most acclaimed title this year

— Keith Bruce, The Glasgow Herald

Few poets can claim to have invented a form – but Julia Copus can… She is an intensely personal poet who also has the instinct, and the means, to project her poems… [Her] ‘metaphysical’ presence of mind, together with the human concerns of the poems, makes Copus’s a very impressive voice indeed

— Maurice Riordan, Poetry Book Society Bulletin

What makes Copus interesting is her robustness – her good ear and well-made lines, and her energetic pursuit of feeling when the mind is “curling / in on itself like the spine of a dog / as it circles a patch of ground to sleep”… These are substantial poems which expand with impressive ease and a willingness to risk dignity

— Lavinia Greenlaw, The Daily Telegraph
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