“Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.”

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

I spend almost every morning with mail.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

There exists a kind of laughter which is worthy to be ranked with the higher lyric emotions and is infinitely different from the twitching of a mean merrymaker.

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged.

For public opinion does not admit that lofty rapturous laughter is worthy to stand beside lofty lyrical emotion and that there isall the difference in the world between it and the antics of a clown at a fair.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

If I knew the language enough to know it was a horrible love song with stupid lyrics.

I am delighted at Des’s support in these elections. And thank him for his rewrite of the lyrics of Send in the Clowns which we are planning to sing at our South East conference.

Probably some of the songs I never even really listened to the lyrics.

The lyrics are not an important thing to me. In fact, it can be a distraction.