“In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.”

“He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air.Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes.”

“The jery, impeded walk of a man stuck in a turnstile, admitted, and stuck in a turnstile, admitted, and stuck in a turnstile. He said it was rheumatoid arthritis. It looked as likely to be cancer of the prostrate metastatising to his hips.”

“It was like being trapped forever in the present tense of the first line of a first reader.”

“Here she is at her kitchen table, fingering a jigsaw of thalidomide ginger, thinking about the arthritis in her hands.”

“...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first.”

“Begin with the soft smelted upturned heart-shaped mouth made for smiling a smile kept for kindness, tenderness, incapable of malice. Am I going too fast for you?The almond eyes see out through their sleepy epicanthic fold. Trusting and calm, if a flicker from slowness, a further flicker from stupidity.Settled in slow-motion beauty, heart-breaking beauty.”