Rufo Quintavalle
Dog, cock, ape and viper

pocket book, 104pp, €12, June 2011
ISBN 979-10-90394-02-5

There is no other contemporary English poet quite like Quintavalle: from his extraordinary name (perhaps the most inherently exciting since “Ezra Pound”) to his exotically-imagined, deeply-thoughtful, ruefully witty, and sometimes very brief, poems, to his slightly marginalised location across the Channel, he represents a different current—one that, should he continue to write as well over the next few years, will establish him, one hopes, as a key British poet of the 2010s. Todd Swift

Lapidary and wry, Rufo Quintavalle’s poetry is distinctive. It often combines a playful stance with a steely stare in ways which may disconcert the newcomer. Yet its unmistakable style is a result of a scrupulous ethics of attention and saying – an approach which successfully sidesteps all unquestioned assumptions about the written and the thought. Peter Hughes, Oystercatcher Press