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.

I do feel that a poem needs not just space, but, ideally, space around that space - space for meditation, reverie, subliminal link-ups. I sense that poetry happens at a level above or below intelligence. It doesn't come into being at a purely rational level.

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.

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

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.

I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it's bad for your poetry to take steroids.