“A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.”
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
