The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.