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

Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."

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.

The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to receptions, to be seen at gatherings of the great and the good, to stand and be bored to death by men in grey suits.

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