Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.

It doesnt seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite.