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

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" My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children. "

" I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political. "

" Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. "

" The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group. "

" Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. "

" At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

" The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. "

" Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. "

" Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. "

" The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. "

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

" Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel. "

" My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God. "

" I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on. "

" We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. "

" My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland. "

" I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. "

" Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker. "

" My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. "

" I've been in the habit of helping people. "

" I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. "

" A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. "

" Write whatever you like! "

" I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. "

" To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. "

" I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. "

" In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example. "

" My passport's green. "

" Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. "

" In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. "

Northern Ireland