If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

I'm really fortunate to be at Stanford. I go home every 10 weeks, but Stanford apart from being just a wonderful university is one of the places that are part of a great conversation.

Love will heal What language fails to know

Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization.

It has always seemed to me a great honor to be called an Irish poet. I don't think I will ever lose that, but it's also a great honor to be a woman poet. I put those things together.

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.

I have always loved American poetry, which is very different from Irish poetry.