Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.

Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.