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.

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.

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

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.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

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