I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.

I prefer always to think that I am creating a book, not a series of stand-alone poems.

Gardens do offer a temporal tableau and certainly mean differently in different eras and indeed geographies (think of the formal gardens in France).

I've always been interested in the fragility of things, and with special urgency now because of climate change, but also because of the accidents of reading.

Everyone had always told me I had to see alpine flowers, since I was writing about flowers, and I had never seen these. So I happened to be teaching a class at the University of Colorado, and I got to go for hikes that took me there. But my perspective was most often down at ground level, trying to see quite tiny exquisite flowers.

The days start to be charged not because tomorrow you're leaving, but because in three weeks you're leaving. The future impinges. So you start to think about the frame.

I try to attach myself to things around me so that they don't slip away.