poets' opinions

Poets can’t be trusted when it comes to their opinions of their contemporaries. Their lack of distance causes deafness to rival voices or results in a chummy humming in tune.

seek the source

You may inflect and refine your opinions from reviews, but form your opinions from the source text.

easy pieces

Reviewing is cursory criticism.

instead of reviews

I’m sorry your book was not reviewed, but those were some nice blurbs you got.