Playing the human game

« Alfred Brendel's poems are a delight. His voice is wonderfully eccentric, droll, sly, mischievous - the same brilliant fingers making a new sound. »
Harold Pinter, Playwright

« Among his many great gifts as a pianist, Alfred Brendel has a genius for bringing out the wit in unexpected composers, not least because he himself is an anarchic spirit, a witty man with wide and idiosyncratic tastes : for Baroque architecture and nonsense verse, Dada art and the works of Edward Gorey. All this is reflected in Brendel's poems. They are trapdoors into his dream-life - funny, sly and deeply subversive, especially of his own grandeur as a musician. »
Al Alvarez, critic and poet

« Brendel is a master of the laconic tone, with striking formulation and rhythmic command. From wordplay via self-caricature to outright nonsense he controls a keyboard of humour that opens worlds. »
Andreas Breitenstein, literary editor, neue zürcher zeitung

« Alfred Brendel's poems have a great deal of wit and charm, and also a great deal of surrealistic strangeness and menace. That's what makes them so good - the mixture of opposites, sometimes on terms with one another and sometimes quarrelling. »
Andrew Motion, poet laureate 1999-2009

« Alfred Brendel, the poet, is a master of interruptions, of swerves and indirections, of jokes that land where no one is looking. A lucid hilarity - sometimes tinged with delicate melancholy - reigns throughout these poems. »
Michael Wood, critic