Tempest has forged her own voice, unlike anything else in the mainstream poetry world. The Independent

She has the comic's knack of placing a lot of weight on thin-shouldered words, words blurred by common currency which are suddenly brought into sharp focus and don't really want to be. Beyond the laughs there's great poignancy - Observer

Dear beauteous Death! the jewel of the just...

Beautiful Girls is not a book for the faint-hearted: it will survive as testament to poetry's force in overcoming - Chris McCabe

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

Dorothea Smartt reveals a poetic intelligence and maturity of form and content which definitely locates her among the best of her generation of poets. - Carol Boyce Davies

For it to exist in the real world, my work has to be bigger than myself.

An engraver in short, sharp slashes that go deep. Andrew Salkey

Some of the most turbulent moments in life through a sharp, clear lens. Maura Dooley

Good poetry is like effective prayer, it feeds the human spirit, it nourishes, it puts us in touch with forces far greater than ourselves. Lorna Goodison

If we see light at the end of the tunnel / It's the light of the oncoming train. - Robert Lowell