From JOHN McAULIFFE, Senior Lecturer and Director, Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester
As a reader and writer, Arc seems to me to be a significant, entirely individual and original presence in UK publishing, providing a home for a wide range of fine UK poets, think of the fine recent books by James Byrne and Ian Pople, but also acting as a crucial conduit to other literary traditions, traditions which are no longer peripheral to a multicultural UK society: whether it is Pakistan's Alamgir Hashmi who read so memorably and effectively when he visited Manchester to support his book The Ramazan Libation, the wonderful Canadian Don Coles, American Brian Henry whose Quarantine offered a new and compelling take on war and the west, or their ground-breaking and vital introductions to the translated work of, among many others, Palestinian Mourid Barghouti and Ireland's Irish-language one-off Cathal O Searcaigh.
Poetry in any country thrives as part of a diverse literary ecosystem: Arc is a signal part of that literary ecosystem and its failure would be a terrible diminution of contemporary British poetry and its place in British culture.