John Burnside

With all the goodwill and local initiative in the world, we are not about to rewild anything until we change our way of thinking about our place in the creaturely world.

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.

The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.

Clearly, any well-kept garden will be a source of pleasure in the summer months; in the bleak urban midwinter, however, there are few activities more likely to energise the spirit than a botanical walk.

The woods were a boon; all too often, the forest offered danger and mystery. Yet it could be liberating. If you entered that wild place on its own terms, you might be accorded wisdom.

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.

I remember a nightfall from childhood, far from home and off the known track: I'd been walking with some older boys, but they ran off and left me, and as darkness hurried in, I suddenly realised how far from home I was.

My father was this big, tough guy, almost heroic in proportion to me as a child. It was only later that I saw how fearful he was.

The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.