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.

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.

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

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

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.