A friend asked me how important a part poetry plays in my life. I replied seriously that I could not imagine being without the unusual beauty and clarity the best poetry brings into my life.
A day is dulled and dimmed if it passes and I do not pick up a book of poems in my library, browse in some anthology, find a new poem in the latest issue of Poetry Review or some other magazine or at least before my eyes shut in sleep glance at some old favourite lines from Walcott, Hopkins, Yeats,
