The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

You can't write drunk.