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

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

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

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

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

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.

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