Quote

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

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.

I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.

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

I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.

Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.