"This is a moving, deeply felt and varied (in terms of forms, voice and style) first collection. At her best Diana Hayes has a fine lyrical talent and what is most striking in Moving Inland is her ongoing search for her own true centre and the attempt -- and the ability, too, in some of these poems -- to write and sing from that centre." ROBERT SWARD, Canadian Literature.

"What is most appealing about Hayes' work is her capacity for language. She is able to evoke a startling image cleanly and precisely, in just the right number of words. What I like best about her poetry is its voice. Here is a poetry that is almost unsaid, that is said at the verge of consciousness." JOHN BARTON, CVII.

"In her poetry of moons and tides, of shadows and lights, Diana Hayes walks softly in order to hear `the small sighing of the figures/when they discover a perfect quiescence...' In these delicate and meditative poems the reader encounters not only the appalling significance of `The Classical Torso in l980' but also the promise of a garden where there is bread.

"`It is the moon's work that brings us here,' she says, and here is not only her island home with its water music, but also a psychic space - no paradise - where, to quote her again, `I fix my mind on repair.' These poems, then, are about salvaging and salvation and are themselves a part of that process." PHYLLIS WEBB

"Lucid, deft, disciplined, and deeply moving, these poems have a vivid strength that is truly astonishing. Diana Hayes, in the eight years since her last collection, has perfected her voice, and, like all poets who do not merely report and comment, but who seek and find, she tells us `what we know ourselves, listening/to the still voices at day's rest.' "This is a wonderful book." ROBIN SKELTON

"These are extremely skillful meditative poems emerging from the movement of thought between the serenities of the writer's coastal environment and her haunted psychic landscape. It is a book that offers itself for repeated reading and deeper understanding.
" GEORGE WOODCOCK, B.C.Bookworld

This is a work of great physical intelligence. In her poems and photographs Diana Hayes explores the boundaries between male and female, passionate and mystical, in language and image at once utterly sensual and utterly transcendent. The searching force of her voice and vision discovers fusion at

these boundaries we often see as fixed, and becomes the spirit incarnate, "the sparrow's arcing flight". GEORGE PAYERLE

Desire is what the mind forgets when the body remembers, a kind of wanting, palpable, as these poems tell us.  Wounds are like wanting, a kind of memory Diana Hayes knows, counting the scars, celebrating what we do when we are with some one, when we are alone.
PATRICK LANE

The poetry of Diana Hayes has a fearless quality, a near delight in taking on the edges of romance without going too far towards sentimentality, in mingling the traditional with the modern.  She writes the alchemy of pain and desire in excruciatingly beautiful, almost crystalline images, all somehow flowing like smoke in a distinctive voice.
BRIAN BRETT

This combination of verbal and visual imagery transcends the sensual and brings us close to the insubstantiality of dream. 
P.K. PAGE

Coming Home is a wonderful collection by five talented poets. Reading this book, one yearns: for movement, for a different horizon, for beauty. And it makes one ache, just a little.
KEVIN PATTERSON

This chapbook explores five complex lives. Salt Spring Islanders, all of them. They’re poets. This means in the warmth of life the cold eye must look upon singing in empty spaces, must quote Pablo Neruda, Chile’s great poet who died during the wrong revolution despite a life full of robust accumulation of detail. They have to question the weather and comtemplate the magical, common thinkgs of a life lived, like firemen shucking the corn from a prolific farm, and they must remember Queequeg’s dark canoe – a coffin that became a life raft.
BRIAN BRETT