The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

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

I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself.