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

Poetry is our human love of metaphor. We see one thing and think something else - 'Travels in Peru', Geoffrey Lehmann

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'

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

'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

But love is a durable fire, in the mind ever burning; never sick, never old, never dead, from itself never turning. - Walter Ralegh 'Walsingham'

Adventurous, compelling and utterly original - The Times

The composition stage of the poem is not finished until I am satisfied with how the poem works in the mouth and in the ear as well as in relation to its imagery and its meaning.

'Francis shows us how exactingly language is a form of attention and how poetry can hold our attention in spectacular ways'. The Guardian