You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

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

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.

History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

If self is a location, so is love.

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.