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.

Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.

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.

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.

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.

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.