A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I want to spell out all / the harboured messages of joy, make an alphabet / of our hands and bodies, rewrite our movements, / make everything strange.Deryn Rees-Jones 'Spells'

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. Mark Strand

I'm always working with things that I don't understand - with the unconscious, the invisible. And trying to find a way to translate it. - Jean Valentine

O Many Named Beloved / Listen to my praise - 'O Many Named Beloved', Samuel Menashe

In my poetry I give primacy to the breath. For me it is the way the poem breathes that gives it form. - Penelope Shuttle

My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. - Andrew Motion