Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.

The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.

Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.

I knew I was in England by the smell.

Surviving means being born over and over.

We find our calling or it finds us, and it's a sin against the fates not to use your talent when you have it.

We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.