“I want these poems to help people to practise empathy”

“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” – Thomas Hardy

He has created over the last twenty years a poetry of great tenderness in praise of the farming landscape and its human keepers. -- Les Murray

Valerie Gillies writes like the wind and jinks like a hare in the fields of language - The Scotsman

What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross / What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee / What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage -- Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI

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 haunting music full of subtlety of thought and religious echoes. -- Charles Bainbridge, The Guardian

Wheatley's is a poetry of displacement, uncertainty and sheer possibility ... Stimulating, resourceful and often very funny - The Guardian

Joyous, brilliant and moving -- Costa Prize judges

He has the gift of epic objectivity: behind his poems we feel not the assertion of his personality, but the actuality of events, the facts and sufferings of history. -- Ted Hughes