'this spiral / of making while unmaking while / the world goes round' -- Mary Jo Salter, 'Young Girl Peeling Apples'

Poems of serious play, relentlessly experimental but grounded in quotidian specifics, characterized by a consummate strangeness and an oddball ferocity ? David Wojahn

This is work you can't ignore - raw, reckless and more bloody-minded than an older, so-called wiser poet would dare to be - Selima Hill

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about. But the fact that writers are dealing with essential issues...I think that's a necessary integration of literary writing with what's actually going on in our world. - Marilyn Hacker

I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. - Maxine Kumin

In a dark time the eye begins to see - 'In a Dark Time', Theodore Roethke

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange./The more things happen to you the more you can't/Tell or remember even what they were. - 'Let it Go', William Empson

Come close the flower says and we come close, / close enough to lift, cup and smell the rose - 'Come Close', Mimi Khalvati

Look for the opening of your spirit into the real world. This is the world in which your words ring true - Sebastian Barker

Wayfarer, pause. Although you may not see,/Earth's bright children, herbs and flowers, are here:/It is their small essential souls that greet you, - 'Inscription for a Scented Garden for the Blind', John Heath-Stubbs

The glittering dance of brilliants must be strung / On that dark thread of sadness which is time - 'Sunt Lacrimae Rerum', Vernon Scannell