I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

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

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

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

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

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.