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“... They flop their big, blunt heads over the wire like dim children penned in hospital cots. Eyes roll, and a silvery iris-petal unfurls to lick the salt from my bare arm. Then each takes it in turn to show its backside in a long, lumbering furniture removal. Bored with my love, they lean to their emerald feast. They never tire of it. They are factories building themselves in many meat-hung chambers ...”

“... We broke slim boughs to stir and sift the leaf-mould. I was befogged by earth-colours, my earthbound sight an Axminster of swirling oak-leaves, beech-mast, till I had trimmed my focus to detail, even acquired a touch of your magical foresight. Seroyeshky, you called them: mushrooms for eating raw, but better cooked, you said, in spite of the nickname ...”

“... To K. Lumley Mother, last week I met that old Ewbank we had when I was three or four, standing outside a junk-shop in Bridge Street. I was sure it was the one because it knew me straight away. At first we were both glad. We looked each other over. I think it felt the sharp impulse of my pity; it made no comment, however, and I was too polite to mention its homeless state ...”

“... Shah maat – the King is dead It’s like an examination – or some vast dinner party where the guests sit in pairs and politely demolish each other. Your ranks of hunted shoulders and frowns attest the passion of the quest. For you are unravelling a childhood, inching back. You cross the polite, hushed street – its pawn cars in a line, its mitred evergreens – and softly click the latches to the room where the grown-ups stand as if they’d guessed you’d visit with death in your childish hand ...”

“... challenges those critics who try to petrify literature into a fixed series of canonical texts. Carol Rumens hopes her anthology may point towards the time when we do not feel obliged ‘to think of writers in terms of gender at all’. Although I’ve never felt obliged to think of writers as anything other than writers, I suspect this view was too ...”

“... months after this picture they were all dead’) lacks a whole dimension of personal suffering. Carol Rumens’s Unplayed Music also contains a photograph-poem, ‘Before these wars’. It is about her parents ‘in the early days of marriage’: I search their laughter in vain: no baby twinkles there, and Hitler has not yet marched on Poland. It is ...”

“... they are to men’s: Wendy Mulford excludes most ‘establishment’ women poets. No Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Carol Ann Duffy and certainly no Fiona Pitt-Kethley or Wendy Cope – which means denying herself, out of petty literary in-fighting, poems that would have strengthened her case. The best poems she does ...”

“... Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the ...”

“... to launch the careers of arts journalists including Laura Cumming and Kate Kellaway, and the poet Carol Rumens. Members of staff at a particularly low financial ebb might be put up rent free in his flat. The Academy Club, which Attallah founded at Waugh’s request in the tiny basement of the Literary Review’s offices, was a place for more drinking and ...”

“... poet like Johnston has more in common with women poets writing today like Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens and Ruth Fainlight. His verses, like theirs, have nothing against being simple, forceful and straightforward. Modern mannered poets show a latent anxiety about the poem not quite coming off which is quite absent in Ruth Fainlight. In a tradition ...”

“... with almost all the contributors with good poems included here – Hugo Williams, Anne Stevenson, Carol Rumens, Andrew Motion. The exceptions, who compose naturally in a more spacious sequence, are James Fenton and of course Seamus Heaney himself. Heaney, in collaboration with Ted Hughes, has produced a most agreeable anthology, along the same lines as ...”