Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.