If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

Where mathematics and spirit join, where proof of the existence of mystery-salvific mystery-shimmers just below the surfaces of human perception, experience and the linguistic veil itself, Killarney Clary's new book-her best to date-dwells, plumbs, persuades and thrills.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it . Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails.

We have to find a way to not refuse to see where we are, what we are doing, and yet we must still live. And making sure to live - to go through life not around it - was always hard. Making sure to be in the vale of soul - making - as John Keats put it. Now it's insanely hard.

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter.

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.