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“... Stirs; quite delicately sips; yawns over Friday’s yellowed Advertiser ... Outside is cold as inside is cold, wind flights over the marsh, the walls of the sky drip as Vic already rises, eases himself out, pink and primed, into the beginning – shapes still inchoate, pewter on oyster, seacoal on zinc. Time never was for pondering. Banjo far-off on the brew! A taste of plickplack in the air! No smell of sharp rain! His sense of day is animal and utterly secure ...”

“... Women Poets, both edited with great skill and erudition by Roger Lonsdale, and Travel Verse, by Kevin Crossley-Holland. When I say ‘read them’ I mean I have dipped copiously, as one usually does with anthologies, sometimes taking years to digest the whole. They all addressed a finite but considerable field (there were many more women, much better ...”

“... oracular pronouncements, dark allegories and curious conceits. In Time’s Oriel, indeed, Kevin Crossley-Holland reaches back to Anglo-Saxon to find at the springs of our tradition an enigmatic story-poem called ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’. A woman speaks; she is angry but indirect; living with one man, she loves another; there’s a hinted tale of ...”

“... indispensable, but for someone looking for an avowedly poetic introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, Crossley-Holland’s book has much to recommend it. Together with a number of poems translated in their entirety (Beowulf among them), it includes extracts from law codes, letters, charters and other documents. Most of the passages he chooses are familiar ones ...”