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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

Seamus Heaney

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  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.

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• 

  There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

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  I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.

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  The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

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  Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

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  The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.

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  The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

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  Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

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  My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.

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  A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

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  Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

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  At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

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  I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.

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

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  My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

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  Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

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