I was a long bodice partly sewn to a skirt, a hem picking / up everything

And I could see that child's one eye which seemed to laugh, and say with glee: 'what caused my death you'll never know, perhaps my mother murdered me.' - W.H. Davies - 'The Inquest'

No matter how compelling her themes, with their demands of compassion and political conscience, Satyamurti never loses hold of her main topic: the capacity of language. Bernard O'Donoghue, Poetry London

A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree. Gerard Manley Hopkins

Among the finest of our poets. - Melvyn Bragg

I am a poet who is a woman, not a woman poet. - Ruth Fainlight

It is not so difficult to kindle the poetic fire in the first place as to keep it going, hot and bright, through a whole lifetime. - Thom Gunn

Finely wrought verse that is tough, but also lyrical. A distinctive new voice - Neil Rollinson

But the exact place where the self and the other touch, where there's the possibility of either transformation or stasis...that's the place that interests me most. - Jo Shapcott

The writer today should be not so much the mouthpiece of a community...as its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct. - Louis MacNeice

What happens with me is quite often I start with a memory, mix it with observations of people I know and then mix in a bit of 'What if...?' - Michael Rosen