Living At That Pitch, On

Your Average Pop Song Or Film Is A Very Sophisticated Item, With Very Sophisticated Ways Of Listening And Viewing That We Have Not Really Consciously Developed Over The Years - Because We Were Having Such A Good Time

One Will Never Again Look At A Birch Tree, After The Robert Frost Poem, In Exactly The Same Way.

The Point Of Poetry Is To Be Acutely Discomforting, To Prod And Provoke, To Poke Us In The Eye, To Punch Us In The Nose, To Knock Us Off Our Feet, To Take Our Breath Away.

On The Other Hand, At Some Level The Mass Of Unresolved Issues In Northern Ireland Does Influence The Fact That There Are So Many Good Writers In The Place.

Obviously One Of The Things That Poets From Northern Ireland And Beyond - Had To Try To Make Sense Of Was What Was Happening On A Day-to-day Political Level.