Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.

We have lived with violence far too long.

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness