In Quiet woman, stay, Jane Mckie’s deeply reflective voice and acuity combine to give us spare, elegant and poised pieces that see beneath the surface of things and people to reveal the intricacies of relationships and the surprising combinations of fragility and strength that weave through life. There is a sense of awe in these poems, not awe of the remote, but of life in all its surprising epiphanies. Praise for Jane McKie’s previous work: Jane McKie looks at things very closely in these poems. And by looking with such intensity she sees things with a strange magnified clarity. Not least, vulnerability. Charlotte Gann, Sphinx Reviews on From the Wonder Book of Would You Believe It? Jane McKie’s is a poetry of wonder. But rather than describing work that is uniquely in awe of its subjects, ‘wonder’ might instead be taken here as indicative of McKie’s poetic approach, which is open and engaged, but always interrogative and searching. Operating within and beyond the purely personal, McKie addresses a range of sources as starting points for her poems. McKie’s poetry presents her readers with a series of disparate images that are continually surprising. However, there is more to these texts than sheer variety. In McKie’s poetry, imaginative truth meets the hard dream of the real, […] The result is a delicate surrealism – a spare, dexterous style that circles thoughts before pinning them down with remarkable precision. The Poetry Archive