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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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