Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life.

If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn't, I'd ignore it.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.

Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.

She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer.