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.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

I shall gain glory or die.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

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

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