Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

Storm Warnings' is a poem about powerlessness - about a force so much greater than our human powers that while it can be measured and even predicted, it is beyond human control. All 'we' can do is create an interior space against the storm, an enclave of self-protection, though the winds of change till penetrate keyholes and 'unsealed apertures.'

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.

Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.

I think what's always been interesting to me than the science and the criminality with this job is what happens to your persona, your disposition, after day in and day out dealing with life and death.

I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.

Where is the politician who has not promised to fight to the death for lower taxes- and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible?

I have got to the point in my life when a lot of people I know have died or are dying, so I realise that somewhere outside the pearly gates is a queue, shuffling nearer and nearer to the celestial box office.