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

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

I do a lot of readings.

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.

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.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

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.