My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
From Seamus Heaney
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
10 perspectives
9 perspectives
8 perspectives
6 perspectives
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives