Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.

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.

For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister

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 concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.

If the garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light of roadside snow.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.