I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.

Poetry is language in orbit.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.