Tempest has forged their 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...

pared-down precision and scorching intensity - Helen Dunmore

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