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

Inside every madeleine, you could say, there is a lamington waiting to come out - Vincent O'Sullivan, from 'On Longing'

Among the finest of our poets. - Melvyn Bragg

“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.”

some pure thing, / Some living source, half-imagined and half-real, / Pulses in the fictive water that I feel. - John Montague, 'The Water Carrier'

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

Hirshfield's poems renew, reaffirm the power of language to move deeply, to articulate experience precisely. - The Antioch Review

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

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

What poetry does is put more oxygen into the atmosphere. Poetry makes it easier to breathe. - Kay Ryan

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