Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

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

The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.