I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry