“What's poetry, if it's worth its salt, / but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?”

There's something in me that insists it sings / Freely, for nothing, the lovely, lonely art / Called poetry, an art you understand. (from 'Venezuela' by Douglas Dunn)

A poet of rare lyric intensity - Oxford Companion to English Literature

Dear beauteous Death! the jewel of the just...

pared-down precision and scorching intensity - Helen Dunmore

A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white a blot upon the night, the moon's dropped child! - Charlotte Mew, 'Fame'

His poetry is what all poetry should be, the surprising and beautiful organisation of things that life has disorganised. John Fuller

I might have known, / What far too soon, alas! I learn'd / The heart can bind itself alone, / And faith may oft be unreturn'd.' Matthew Arnold, 'Isolation: To Marguerite'