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

How perilous is it to choose / not to love the life we're shown? -- 'The Badgers,' Seamus Heaney

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

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'

My days are but the tombs of buried hours; / Which tombs are hidden in the piled years; / But from the mounds there spring up many flowers, / Whose beauty well repays their cost of tears. Isaac Rosenberg, 'My Days'

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

All things within this fading world hath end. ('Before the Birth of One of Her Children')

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