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.

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

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

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.

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.

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.