My passport’s green.
Category Archive: April 13
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.
To encounter ‘Beowulf’ is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.