The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

We have to find a way to not refuse to see where we are, what we are doing, and yet we must still live. And making sure to live - to go through life not around it - was always hard. Making sure to be in the vale of soul - making - as John Keats put it. Now it's insanely hard.

Where mathematics and spirit join, where proof of the existence of mystery-salvific mystery-shimmers just below the surfaces of human perception, experience and the linguistic veil itself, Killarney Clary's new book-her best to date-dwells, plumbs, persuades and thrills.

It's very hard to look in a mirror and see anything which resembles what one feels one's self to be. I think that discomfort, that dislocation, disintegration - that raw lack of feeling whole - that dysmorphia - is a very good place, in this moment, to hunt for the kind of experience which really requires the means of poetry to be grasped or felt.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.