Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

I was always influenced by language.

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

i wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.