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

Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.

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.

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.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

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