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 the New Yorker or some other magazine or at least before my eyes shut glance at some old favourite lines from Walcott, Hopkins, Yeats, Carter or a score of other supreme masters of the art and craft of making poems.
In most peoples’ lives I find that poetry is absent. Of course I do not blame or condemn them, especially as many live better, more considerate, more caring and constructive lives than I do. But I do not understand how they
