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 do a lot of readings.

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

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.

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.

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.