Ah! why has happiness no second spring? Charlotte Smith

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

Who wants to know / a story's end, or where a road will go? - Sheenagh Pugh, 'What If This Road'

Poetry's about what can't be said. WS Merwin

The kind of poetry that imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent - The Times

At once catalogues of ordinary, precise vision...and poems of musical and metaphysical ambition, Maguire is the heiress of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Adam Phillips, The Observer

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

I would say that the poem exists in a space somewhere between the reader and the author, and in a sense belongs to neither, and both. - Don Paterson

...the communication of the dead/is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. - from Part 1 of 'Little Gidding', T. S. Eliot

I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems. - Larkin to his publisher

Poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential, as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the gods. - Ted Hughes