“He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag. He was what his brain could make nothing of.”

“He could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will –That can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his attention.”

“One day God felt he ought to give his workshop a spring clean... It was amazing what ragged bits and pieces came from under his workbench as he swept. Beginnings of creatures, bits that looked useful but had seemed wrong, ideas he'd mislaid and forgotten... There was even a tiny lump of sun. He scratched his head. What could be done with all this rubbish?”

“It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems—he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers.”

“Day by day his sister grewPaler with the woundShe could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed itEach day with her blue Breton jacket.- from Life After Death”

“I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.”

“In a cage of wire-ribsThe size of a man’s head, the macaw bristles in a staringCombustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes.In the old lady’s parlour, where an aspidistra succumbsTo the musk of faded velvet, he hangs in clear flames,Like a torturer’s iron instrument preparingWith dense slow shudderings of greens, yellows, blues, Crimsoning into the barbs:Or like the smouldering head that hungIn Killdevil’s brass kitchen, in irons, who had beenVolcano swearing to vomit the world away in black ash,And would, one day; or a fugitive aristocratFrom some thunderous mythological hierarchy, caughtBy a little boy with a crust and a bent pin,Or snare of horsehair set for a song-thrush, And put in a cage to sing.The old lady who feeds him seedsHas a grand-daughter. The girl calls him ‘Poor Polly’, pokes fun.’Jolly Mop.’ But lies under every full moon,The spun glass of her body bared and so gleam-stillHer brimming eyes do not tremble or spillThe dream where the warrior comes, lightning and iron,Smashing and burning and rending towards her loin: Deep into her pillow her silence pleads.All day he stares at his furnaceWith eyes red-raw, but when she comes they close.’Polly. Pretty Poll’, she cajoles, and rocks him gently.She caresses, whispers kisses. The blue lids stay shut.She strikes the cage in a tantrum and swirls out:Instantly beak, wings, talons crashThe bars in conflagration and frenzy, And his shriek shakes the house.”