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.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

If self is a location, so is love.

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

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.