The Aim Of Poetry And The Poet

A Public Expectation, It Has To Be Said, Not Of Poetry As Such But Of Political Positions Variously Approvable By Mutually Disapproving Groups.

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 Most Exhilarating For The Writer And The Reader, Are Gift-things-poems Which Arrive On Their Own Energy, Poems That In William Shakespeare's Term "slip" From You.

The Gift Of Writing Is To Be Self-forgetful... To Get A Surge Of Inner Life Or Inner Supply Or Unexpected Sense Of Empowerment, To Be Afloat, To Be Out Of Yourself.

The Ireland I Now Inhabit Is One That These Irish Contemporaries Have Helped To Imagine.