Poetry, above all is a series of intense moments ­ its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion..

The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough fo….

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.

I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine..

You have me like a drawing, erased, coloured in, untitled, signed by your tongue..

As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike h….

She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale….

Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning..

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen..

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite..

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart..

What will you do now with the gift of your left life?.

Poetry and prayer are very similar..

Between 9am and 3pm is when I work most intensely.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper..

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times..

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape..

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it..

I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life..

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as te….