"Regina Derieva's best poems are simultaneously elusive and 
immediate, striking and understated, personal and distanced. 
Few poets attempt such transformation in so few words."

                                                       Tim Liardet

"Regina Derieva was, first and foremost, a Christian poet, a 
worthy heir of a long line of metaphysical poets, be they 
English, French or Russian. Far from any inflated rhetoric or
didactics, her poems reached the very core of the Christian 
experience, which meant serious and fearless attitude to life,
suffering and death. The imagery and syntax of the Gospels 
and the Books of Prophets was, for her, a natural element just
as apocalyptic presentiments and mystical hope formed the axis
of her world-outlook".
                                                   Tomas Venclova

"The importance of Derieva’s poetry lies in this sense of how
worlds permeate each other, how the world inside and the
world outside harmonize or struggle against each other with
little distinction between the state of politics and culture 
and the state of the soul."
                                         Pembroke Magazine

"I've read Regina's poems and found many of them very 
striking, particularly the newer ones.  She's a real
metaphysical!"
                                                     James Lasdun

 "Derieva delights in contradictions and is a master of the 
epigram.  'Maxims and Paradoxes on the Accidental Sheets'
begins:  'All my life / I sought / an angel. / And he 
appeared/ in order to say: / I am no angel!' Throughout 
it all she wears her heart on her sleeve--and perhaps this
makes her unfashionable among contemporary poets; but hers
is a brave and eminently readable voice."
                                         Poetry Review (UK) 

"The real authors here are poetry and freedom themselves."

                                                   Joseph Brodsky

"With wit and courage, her poetry lives on." 
                                                       Annie Finch

"Regina Derieva’s relationship with the world was severe and 
tender, truthful and tragic; it reflects her own tragic life as
well as the tragedies of the country she was born in. Her 
poetry has a wide range of topics: from religious believes to 
everyday life. It can help to find a difficult answer to a 
difficult question; it can also comfort the reader or even 
cure."
                                         Valentina Polukhina

"I love her poems, serious and tender, hers was the 
metaphysical voice that endears, allows kindness. I love the
humor and fierce clarity of her prose pieces, those of hers 
that drop musical notes all over the floor, and then kneel to 
gather them like feathers. We have lost a poet so 
unmistakably beautiful, a poet whose attentiveness to the 
world was a prayer. May her works find many readers."

                                                     Ilya Kaminsky