A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

I hardly ever look at my published books.

Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.