"Griffiths is his own man, a ranging intelligence and an exquisite chronicler of later-life love and its complications and rewards. The poems chosen from his volume ‘Later Love Poems’ are worth the price of admission all by themselves, tender, telling and true as they are."
"This generous selection from forty years give us the measure of the scope and depth of Steve Griffiths’ work. From the start, it held the tension between the personal and the political, the view from the edge and the crunch-points of contemporary change. At the hinge of the book, we find the revelatory sidestep into the shifting, wry utopia of Al-Chwm, not an escape from but a deft critique of our realities…from where the writing returns to address the inner and the outer world with new confidence and clarity."
"It’s a parallel universe, a magical epic, a comfort, a mystery.”
BBC Producer Laura Thomas, on An Elusive State, 2007
"An Elusive State is a poetic epic of time, place and language…both as invented as More’s original Utopia, and as real as the small town on Anglesey where Griffiths was born… a distinctive, distinguished accomplishment…truly a parable of many parallels, one for and beyond our times…”
Amanda Hopkinson, Planet, 2009
"Challenging, refreshing…the tangential world we really inhabit…ambitious, demanding… The book has a strong and well maintained intellectual thrust which frankly sets it apart from much modern poetry. Al-Chwm itself flickers before us like a mirage, but changes shape as the next poem arrives. In the end...we must realise that the people these ambitious and challenging poems describe are ourselves, and that they represent the permanently unsettled (and unsettling) human imagination. The book is a quest, and for every reader that quest will have a different result. Maybe that is its great value.”
Robert Minhinnick, on An Elusive State, 2008
"Late Love Poems explores what is timeless about love but also those qualities of sexuality, pain, devotion and grief that are affected by the ageing process…It presents an intimate diary of love which explores the rhythms of living with someone, cooking with someone, sleeping with someone… Ultimately, though Griffiths’ collection challenges one age-old stereotype – that love is the domain of the young – it is unable to deny the other: love cannot make us immortal.”
Katya Johnson, Poetry Wales, 2017
"A varied but coherent collection by a subtle and deeply intelligent writer who can address human concerns like the intimate recall of childhood or the challenges of middle age without sentimentality; he can move between abstract thought and concrete particularities with such ease that sometimes the join is invisible. This is mature writing, picking its way through the layers and ‘surfaces’ of an experience, suddenly clarified into a single lucid image”.
Philip Gross, on Surfacing, 2011
"Dipping through Surfaces begins with the straightforward image of the poet’s life as a stack of years, which then becomes a tree of disks – a strangely beautiful image with half-lived years that ‘glowered in the trunk’ and others just ‘a pulsing spark’ – before finally branching out into a subterranean labyrinth of tunnels, burrows, lofts, mines, attics and passages. This seems to be the loose theme of the collection: coming up to the surface from a dark place. Recovery seems to come through reverent concentration at the surface of things – in the world and in language. This brings the poet to a recognition, at the end of the collection, of the necessity of those dark, strange places, a realisation that ‘unregarded bolts of darkness / hold things together’ (‘Dark Energy’)”.
Steven Hitchins, on Surfacing, Poetry Wales, 2013
"…(the poems) show him to possess that defining attribute of the important talent, the capacity for sustained development. The continuity is felt, imparted by a pulse from the heart of books and poems, rather than residing in conveniently definable themes or motifs. Griffiths’ achievement lies in the emergence in his writing of a mode in which social, ethical and personal elements undergo a deep fusion…”
Douglas Houston on Selected Poems, Poetry Wales, 1994