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.

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

I do a lot of readings.

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.

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

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

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.