Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day politica….

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy..

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense wh….

Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was..

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously….

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read..

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aimi….

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were..

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the….

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way..

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that..

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride..

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent..

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect..

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in h….

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini..

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language..

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.