Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. Mark Strand

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. - W. H. Auden

...the communication of the dead/is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. - from Part 1 of 'Little Gidding', T. S. Eliot

What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come. - Galway Kinnell

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders - Seamus Heaney

There is no gaudiness in her poetry; instead the reader is aware of a generosity of spirit which allows the poems' subjects their own unbullied reality. - The Listener

Every writer nearly always has a lost woman. - Patricia Beer

Poetry's only obligation is to the truth. Whether this truth is widely popular or not is irrelevant. It should be the best truth possible and that is the only quality that gives it any hope of survival. - George Szirtes

All poems are rash acts. - Allen Curnow

She is wise without portentousness, her technique faultless and her imagination fiery, political and fresh - Carol Rumens, The Independent.