It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives.

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker’s cough in the hall.

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.

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again – in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the...

History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood...

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

The wartime, in other words, was pre-reflective time for me. Pre-literate too. Pre-historical in its way.

But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am in fact...

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

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

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in...

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations...

The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off...

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning...

words…To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.

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

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy...

The way we are living,timorous or bold,will have been our life.

To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass…through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

The next move is always the test.

All I know is a door into the dark

This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland and of having lived...

That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.

Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,that...

It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s...

And a young prince must be prudent like that,giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards, in age when fighting startssteadfast companions will stand by himand hold the line.

I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind it.

I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.

We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm.

Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport’s green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast The Queen.

But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new...

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

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

The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long...

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

I suppose I’m saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.