I believe that in all diverse forms of artistic expression across all countries, there are some sensitivities in common. Esther Phillips

Glyn Maxwell covers a greater distance in a single line than most people do in a poem. Joseph Brodsky

In the face of loss - human, natural, temporal - McQueen finds salvation in language. Often her work is about artistic endeavour itself: the desire to freeze time, the realisation that this is impossible - Sarah Quigley

A dynamic reader, Eggleton has a rapid-fire delivery that releases a torrent of images, some startling, ugly, or funny - Greg O'Brien

My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Wilfred Owen

“A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree.”

Rest on memory's sea-bed: we will swim down to thee. - Andrew Johnston, 'The Sunflower'

some pure thing, / Some living source, half-imagined and half-real, / Pulses in the fictive water that I feel. - John Montague, 'The Water Carrier'

Burn Ovid with the rest. Lovers will find/ A hedge-school for themselves and learn by heart/ All that the clergy banish from the mind,/ When hands are joined and head bows in the dark. - 'Penal Law' by Austin Clarke

The blood jet is poetry,/ There is no stopping it. - 'Kindness', Sylvia Plath (written 1st February 1963)

There is something white stars say to you/and you throw off all the night to hear the sound of falling snow. - 'White Noise', Kevin Crossley-Holland