"Unalloyed good writingÖ Sail's work is certainly tender. Disturbances, threats and doubts are confronted in his poems, but there is an equally vivid tendency towards celebrationÖ He seems to me a poet of acceptances more than rejections. There is a genuine presence of affection in his writing, of world-love and enjoyments."
Douglas Dunn, Poetry Review

"Sail is a lyric poet in the classic mouldÖ He has a wonderful confidence with metaphor, rhythm and timingÖ This is the most heartening collection since Douglas Dunn's Elegies."
Peter Forbes

"These are fastidious, pleasurable, wittily evocative poems, but haunted by disharmony, by a sense of edges and endings, the silence after music, the end of the mazeÖ Lawrence Sail creates marvellous exotic miniatures, enamelled models of perception which repay reading and re-reading for their vivid description."
Hugh Haughton, Times Literary Supplement

"Literate, warm, often wittyÖ a book to feel at home in, and that is a welcome sensation."
Martin Dodsworth, The Guardian