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.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987

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

Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry