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

I was a long bodice partly sewn to a skirt, a hem picking / up everything

She is one of very few poets to be equally probing and technically sophisticated in both languages, intuitively sensitive to the peculiarities of each. Ruth McIlroy, Planet

Spilt is that liquor, my too hasty hand threw down the cup, and did not understand. - Amy Lowell 'A Blockhead'

And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans, my heart gives you love. - Walt Whitman 'Dirge For Two Veterans'

All that was good, all that was fair, all that was me is gone. - Robert Louis Stevenson 'Sing Me A Song of A Lad That Is Gone'

'There is no God,' the wicked saith, 'and truly it's a blessing, for what he might have done with us it's better only guessing.? - Arthur Hugh Clough 'There Is No God'

Strands of autobiography, a deeply sensuous ecology of place, historical narratives; the inner world of imagination and the often difficult realities of the postcolonial nation are interwoven in McWatt's bold but carefully worked out architecture. Peepal Tree

Adventurous, compelling and utterly original - The Times