'To read [ Birthday Letters ] is to experience the psychic equivalent of the bends'. It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping.The book's contents are unfailingly interesting, but what makes Birthday Letters a poetic as opposed to a publishing landmark is the valency of the poetry itself.The poems give the impression of utterance, avalanching towards vision.' Seamus Heaney, Irish Times