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

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

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

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.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.