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

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.

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.

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

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.