Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

The end of art is peace.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

Write whatever you like!

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

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.