“Olds writes “poetry more faithful to the felt truth of reality than any prose could be.” – Richard Wakefield.

A tune that one has once heard and liked [that] seems to haunt the mind and will not be dismissed until entirely mastered.

Joyous, brilliant and moving -- Costa Prize judges

Yaa de Villiers' silence-smashing poems (in this manner reminiscent of Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife) are sensitive, unafraid to be erotic, sometimes tragic, and always irreverent - Tolu Ogunlesi, Wasafiri magazine

And die of nothing but a rage to live

Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest; / O born to rule in partial Law's despite, / Resume thy native empire o'er the breast! Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 'The Rights of Women'

Among the finest of our poets. - Melvyn Bragg

The verse flexes muscle after muscle...The writing...can hover and dance. It has genuine grace. - George Szirtes

A large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland - Edward Hirsch

The poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence. - Carolyn Forche

...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