I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

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 don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

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.

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.