“The poems of Stephen Boyce have an enviable assurance: clear, well-crafted and precise, they have an air of knowing where they are going, and invariably find their destination in an elegant closure. He is a master of the simple but telling phrase.”
Roger Caldwell
“In time of war, a woman ‘darns to the ticking of clocks’. In peace, a child sees through a telescope ‘all the life I ever wanted’. The music of Stephen Boyce’s brief, intense poems quietly reveals both pain and joy, ‘in the comfort of remembered song’.”
Alison Brackenbury
“Stephen Boyce is the master of surprising similes: carriages ‘jolting like the lurch of camels’, the hole in a sock ‘like a tonsured head’, a face ‘red as a pomegranate flower’. Written with considerable poetic skill and emotional warmth, his perceptive cameos of lives, nature and art are finely-tuned. The Sisyphus Dog augments Stephen Boyce’s rapidly growing reputation admirably.”
Robyn Bolam