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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.