Good words are worth much, and cost little.

Not only rich music, an easy lyricism, but also grit, and earthy honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and clean. - Gwendolyn Brooks

His poems are direct and arresting, playful, full of startling imagery, and are hilarious, passionate and erotic as often as they are political - often managing to be all these things at once - Maura Dooley

The Laskey effect...is of suddenly sensing that more meaning is inherent in 'ordinary' moments than we were expecting. - Mark Halliday

Forget the corny comedian: Pam Ayres is a proper poet, whose wistful, funny, and perceptive verse captures both the joy and unfairness of life. - Sunday Times

“The poet is a lifer. Anyone who gets into the game will soon start wishing that there was a version of it with lower stakes, but there isn't.”

Among the finest of our poets. - Melvyn Bragg

The poet's reading, like his words, is energetic and as alive as quicksilver - The Observer

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

There stands the base and root of the living rock /Thirty thousand feet of solid Cumberland. - To the River Duddon, Norman Nicholson

Burn Ovid with the rest. Lovers will find/ A hedge-school for themselves and learn by heart/ All that the clergy banish from the mind,/ When hands are joined and head bows in the dark. - 'Penal Law' by Austin Clarke

How you became a poet's a mystery! / Where did you get your talent from? / I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry - / one was a stammerer, the other dumb.- 'Heredity', Tony Harrison