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

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

I felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

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.