Poetry is language in orbit.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...

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.

If self is a location, so is love.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.