Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

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

The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.

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.

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.