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

Weddings and funerals have so much in common (except that in Ireland funerals are more fun - better food, better drink): at both, our senses are sharpened and we register much more than usual - a striking face or hair-do, the wind's behaviour, a bird singing.

I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

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.

When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.

For me the form, the stanzaic shape, is an endorsement, proof that I'm engaged with the Latin or Greek at an original level, that my versions are explorations.

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.