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.

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

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

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

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

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

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.