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.

The next move is always the test.

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

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.