Hats off to these publishers for publishing each collection in the conventional way, without my financial input at any point. For Graft Poetry Without a Dog (2008) and Eleven Wonders (2012) proved bestsellers.
Without a Dog
I read Julia Deakin’s book straight through at a sitting, feeling at home in every one of her poems. She writes with a mature wit and wisdom that suggests that, despite her empathy with those who suffer and who have suffered in this flawed, unjust world of ours, she finds life constantly worth celebrating.
Anne Stevenson
Eleven Wonders
Powerful, assured, elegant. Her formal skill and inventiveness make this a rich and eclectic collection. Those who, like me, have admired her individual poems in the past, will be struck by their cumulative strength and range and this book deserves to win her many new readers.
Michael Symmons Roberts
Sleepless
From the first poem’s quiet lyricism, where words span fourteen lines in a single sentence title-to-close, losing nothing of music, meaning or metaphor, to the wit and word-play of ‘Bradford’, and the final poem’s dazzling thirty sentences, sometimes experimental, always musical, sharp-eyed, intelligent poems that ring in this reader’s mind.
Gillian Clarke
A fine collection.
The Half-Mile High Club
A prizewinning Poetry Business Pamphlet I’m still very proud of.
Sharp and knowing, these poems dance before the reader in their exuberance and sudden dark. They are bold, irreverent and wickedly funny.
Alison Brackenbury
Julia Deakin 