The United States' poetry emerged when there was a high literacy rate in the United States, even in the 19th century. People read the poetry when it was written. In Ireland, there was a poor literacy rate and people remember that poetry. That was handed on as a memorial tradition.

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.

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

I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet.

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

Love will heal What language fails to know

. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing