The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

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

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

All I know is a door into the dark

The end of art is peace.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.