The diamond absolutes. I am neither internee nor informer; An inner emigre, grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood-kerne Escaped from the massacre… - Seamus Heaney

Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that ‘A poem should be equal to / not true’. As a defiant statement of poetry’s gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. 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 retuning of the world itself. 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. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it.

At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades…I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination…These people are with me. It’s just a stage of your life when the death of people doesn’t banish them out of your consciousness, They’re part of the light in your head.