Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion. Carol Ann Duffy

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all. Allen Tate

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about. But the fact that writers are dealing with essential issues...I think that's a necessary integration of literary writing with what's actually going on in our world. - Marilyn Hacker

I am a poet who is a woman, not a woman poet. - Ruth Fainlight

I would say that the poem exists in a space somewhere between the reader and the author, and in a sense belongs to neither, and both. - Don Paterson

the most dynamic, brilliant, free-wheeling poet around, endlessly accessible and inventive - The Scotsman

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

A jet-age Tennyson - London Review of Books

Wayfarer, pause. Although you may not see,/Earth's bright children, herbs and flowers, are here:/It is their small essential souls that greet you, - 'Inscription for a Scented Garden for the Blind', John Heath-Stubbs

Love is injustice, said Camus./We want to be loved. What's still more true? - 'The Ledger', J. D. McClatchy