'Kay's Darling locates her alongside Ted Hughes - even T.S. Eliot - in that elite group whose children's writing, rather than gainsaying their primary poetic project, informs and enriches it - One of Kay's greatest strengths is the way she locates individual experience in the collective. As befits an adoptive daughter of peace marchers, Kay is a writer for whom the personal is indeed political - Even such a public poet as Kay, though, writes verse shaped above all by human cadence. She has an immaculate ear for speech patterns, using accent and dialect, in particular, to lift and characterise' - Fiona Sampson, The Guardian 'Darling is proof of her place as one of the most deft, most airy, most unencumbered, most fearless and most humane of poets. It culminates in a set of poems whose rhetorical ease and lack of pretension are like a clear starry sky on a good frosty night' - Ali Smith, The Guardian (Books of the Year)