“Poetry doesn’t only have to exist as words on a page in a standard house font. We read them out loud, we listen to others, we watch them be performed… This poem is about noisy overlapping messages, it’s about everything being too much”
“When I’m writing, I tend to hold closely to the rhythm of the poem as it’s unfolding, line by line and breath by breath.”
“I’d definitely consider writing poetry to be more a sculptor at the rock-face, at least at times, with a dash of the composer listening for the motifs, the rises and falls, and the music”
“For me, a poem must have a certain lyric sense, not in a fascistic way, but the song must be somewhere within it”
“If I have an economy of language, it’s the result of twelve years of sleeves-rolled up, punishing labour… when I was younger, the poetry wrote itself. Now I’m lucky if I can write a poem at all!”
“My work has an absorption in the baby or child, reaching into their sensual, physical and emotional world through imagery, speech and metaphor”
“[As] poets we track and witness what is happening all around the world as pollution and extinction becomes not a prediction for the future, but the very place we live in”
“A poem can grow from a photograph (or several) like a crystal”
“Every single word, every one of my lines, arises out of the quest for immortality, to conquer death”
