Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

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

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

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

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

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.