I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

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.

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

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