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

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

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

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking