What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.

In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.

He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag. He was what his brain could make nothing of.

I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars.