To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

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

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.