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

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

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.

I do a lot of readings.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

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

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.