I look and look, / As though I could be saved simply by looking

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.

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.

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.

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.