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

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'

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

"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad." Lord Byron

She is all States, and all princes I, / Nothing else is. John Donne

The furthest distances I've travelled/ have been those between people. Leontia Flynn

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini. Paul Muldoon.

All her poems have written underneath - 'I have seen it.' - Randall Jarrell