If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs?. John Clare

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

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

Dorothea Smartt reveals a poetic intelligence and maturity of form and content which definitely locates her among the best of her generation of poets. - Carol Boyce Davies

We've all led raucous lives,/ some of them inside, some of them out./ But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Charles Wright (from 'Littlefoot')

The kind of poetry that imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent - The Times

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.

Her poems are voyages of discovery. Literally. Over and over she writes about the journeys, physical and metaphysical, that are transformative experiences - Sarah Maguire, Poetry Review

The lower-case lightness of Tom Raworth and the northern comic realism of Simon Armitage - The Guardian

Bird's is a poetry of ideas, but unexpected, often extraordinary ones - Times Literary Supplement

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