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.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

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

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