In the face of loss - human, natural, temporal - McQueen finds salvation in language. Often her work is about artistic endeavour itself: the desire to freeze time, the realisation that this is impossible - Sarah Quigley

I think of poetry as an art of seeing, an art by which, in my blindness, I learn to see. - Jeremy Hooker, 'At the Edge'

And here is love / like a tinsmith's scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin - 'Mossbawn Sunlight', Seamus Heaney

The essence of Orkney's magic is silence, loneliness and the deep marvellous rhythms of sea and land, darkness and light. - George Mackay Brown

...if poetry is a method of approaching truths, and each of us with a human soul and 'a tongue in oor heids' can make an approach toward a truth, poetry is inherently democratic. - Kathleen Jamie

A writer is not interested in explaining reality; he's interested in capturing it. - Brendan Kennelly

My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. - Andrew Motion

With a lyric poem, you look, and meditate, and put the rock back. With fiction you poke things with a stick to see what will happen. - Margaret Atwood

Young or old / What was I but the story told / By an unageing one? (Kathleen Raine, from 'Ah, many, many are the dead...')

I hope to write poetry that uses the full keyboard, claiming its full range of method and subject. - Sean O'Brien