I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.

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

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.

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

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.