“..and only they, children, excellent students of their own self worth, do know the value of their lives - from 'Outside St Dominic's Priory. Snapshot, July 2015'”

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

Her poems are voyages of discovery. Literally. Over and over she writes about the journeys, physical and metaphysical, that are transformative experiences - Sarah Maguire, Poetry Review

The lower-case lightness of Tom Raworth and the northern comic realism of Simon Armitage - The Guardian

Bird's is a poetry of ideas, but unexpected, often extraordinary ones - Times Literary Supplement

A reckless tumble of words mixing the high and the low, like a rummage sale after the death of someone who adored both Shakespeare and smut. Norman Mailer

We lie on love's breath - Jan Kemp, 'Puriri'

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. - W. H. Auden

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

...anything I have seen, I've only seen by virtue of having been very inattentive or rebellious at school, and looking at what was out of the corner of the picture, what was outside the frame. - Roy Fisher

A true poem is dreamed and danced as well as thought. - Les Murray