Praise and Poems

Monuments stretches inner and outer here. From its explosive opening with the afterlife of a suicide bomber through a diary of the Iraq war, the poetry, themes and languages shock into something more radical and engaged than many have seen for years. Its extrovert narrative arc constantly tries to meet what it invokes: politics, risk, the despised spiritual, raw subjects not talked of in English.

The Preface echoes this: everything ‘literal’ is also ‘symbolic’—in Yeats’ deployment of such bi-focal vision—with Ramsay’s esoteric immersion. Finally, Monuments is about memory; what needs to be remembered. It nags at the story of our time and this poetry’s willingness to engage with it, while absolutely affirming transcendent reality.
You are an unlocker of imprisoned souls and true healer…a great gift to our world and the generation who are seeking for spiritual consciousness…your poems spring spontaneously from a pure well of life
Kathleen Raine

Here is a poet who dares the big picture, the broad canvas, writing unequivocally from the soul to the soul. It is a poetry that strives through the inner awakening of true feeling perception to heal the wounds of a fragmented world and utter its inmost script
Alan Rycroft, Caduceus

Jay Ramsay is one of our most distinguished eloquent and passionate visionary poets, someone who knows that the highest role of poetry in a catastrophic time is to keep the flames of spirit burning steadily
Andrew Harvey

Jay Ramsay writes in the tradition of Kathleen Raine, a modern tradition but one nourished on the Perennial Philosophy. Sincerity and spirituality, a universal Englishness in free verse, a sense of community and friendship, the landscape of Albion; all are abundant in his work. He eschews the board-games and trivial pursuits of the so-called mainstream, uncomplainingly. Just when it seems too angelic, he calls up the bardic shadow-side. His satire ‘Putin’ is a brilliant portrait, devastatingly relevant, drawing on his own practice as a psychotherapist to reveal the narcissism of power.
Niall McDevitt

What an outpouring!
Ted Hughes

So much good work
Robert Bly