In Their Own Words

Helen Ivory is a visually precise poet, with the gift of creating stunning images with an economy of means.

-- James Sutherland-Smith

Helen Ivory creates a troubled yet beguiling world rich in irony and disquiet. She possesses a strongly-grounded narrative voice which, combined with her dextrous transformative takes both on reality and on what lies beyond reality’s surface, puts one in mind of the darker side of Stevie Smith who said that poetry “is a strong explosion in the sky”.

-- Penelope Shuttle

[of George Szirtes] I can't think of anyone but Louis MacNeice whose work has struck me as having such a combination of sheer verbal energy, contemporary pertinence and acuity, formal legerdemain, imaginative elan and fertile, courageous strangeness.

-- Marilyn Hacker

There are none of the adept terza rima or sonnets we might expect from Szirtes here. Instead "a series of narrative cries and thrusts" create a feeling of chaos. Yet his use of language to interrogate language remains as uncomfortably elegant as a Leni Riefenstahl film.

-- Nancy Campbell * Poetry Review *

This engaging collection of poems and verses is best fitted for the younger end of the 8 to 12 age-group. The bset of them take a quirky, sidelong, witty look at the world, expanding on a child’s observation, for example the noise a fridge makes as it digests our offerings ... the whole collection is full off infectious delight in language.

-- Peter Hollindale * The School Librari