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.

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

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

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

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

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.