in interview with Declan Meade.

Ian Duhig was born in London to Irish parents and currently lives in Leeds. He worked with homeless people for fifteen years before becoming a full-time writer and teacher of Creative Writing. Duhig has won the Poetry Society of Great Britain's National Poetry Competition twice, a Cholmondeley Award and a Forward Prize. His most recent book, The Lammas Hireling (Picador 2003) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Forward Best Collection and T.S. Eliot prizes.
This interview took place in Dublin in November 2003 while Ian was the 2003 International Writer Fellow at Trinity College.

You've said that poetry was very much part of your background and that your mother recited a lot of poetry. When were you aware of poetry as something on the page?

Well I have to admit, your question makes me realise for the first time that it's due to the fact that it was spoken all of the time that I've always been particularly aware that poetry is closer to speech than prose is. The effects of poetry are very often spoken effects. I was interested in poetry, I suppose, because of the Irish background. When you get Irish people talking about poetry, it's like getting Brazilians to talk about football‹it's just something they're very, very good at, and have been for a long time.
I started writing poetry seriously quite late, although I did read a lot of contemporary poetry. I studied English at university, and I was keen on poetry, but I'd have to say that the person I was most keen on was Derek Walcott. I didn't know him at all when I went but there was a West Indian writer-in-residence called Wayne Brown who gave me Walcott's books and I was just astonished at how good he was, and at the same time amazed at how little his name was known. So I asked Wayne Brown, and he pointed out the fact Walcott was black probably had something to do with it, and that shut me up. I had to argue to get him on the Commonwealth Literature course, which is extraordinary now when you look back and think we're talking about a Nobel Prize winner. He really had a big influence on me.
I went to work in Northern Ireland, but even then I wasn't really that interested in the poetry. I knew the work of the poets, but I wasn't going to poetry readings or things like that. Poetry has always been around, but I suppose the difference between me and other people is that it has always had a recognisable niche in my life. You know, for most people in England it would be true that poetry hardly ever gets a look in, but even when I wasn't writing seriously it certainly formed a part of my life.
My mother used to learn poetry by heart, that's how she was taught, and I really think that helps. I know it's very old-fashioned and sneered at now, but that's what I mean about poetry and speech. Poetry needs to be launched into speech really, and knowing it by heart is probably the easiest way of doing that.

You say that the poetry you most admire is that which puts you in a stupor of admiration. Whose poems, apart from Walcott's, do that for you?

A lot of the Irish poets. It's unfashionable now, but it is the beauty and musicality of poetry that impresses me. I have to say that what Michael Longley does seems to be magical, and that is what I'm most attracted to. He seems to do things that other people don't even know you can do with poetry. I have huge admiration for the likes of Paul Muldoon. Muldoon's poetry is full of genius, there's no question of it. But there's a difference between genius and magic and I find magic in Michael Longley. I think you find both in Seamus Heaney.
You've also got to remember that when I grew up, there was absolutely no question but that there was a huge gulf in class between the best Irish poets and the best English poets. And the best Irish poets are still in a league of their own. So even if you weren't that interested in Ireland, you were reading the Irish poets because they were the best.
People used to criticise the Irish poets for not commenting enough. But Derek Mahon's 'As It Should Be' is a poem I've been able to take with me to workshops and groups for years, and say that this is absolutely about what's going on in Northern Ireland. It's very specific. It's about a particular type of Protestant's cast of mind, but it still is in its own way a beautiful poem. There's a line in it about the children: their voices echo lightly along the coast. I just love that, phrases like that. I was very jealous of people who could do that sort of thing.
I do like poetry to be beautiful. That seems to be what makes it memorable. And I think memory is at the back of it all. It's like Mnemosyne was the mother of the muses, and she was memory, that's what the name means.
I think Michael Longley's poem 'Ghetto' is tremendous, an absolutely fantastic poem. Also Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in County Wexford'. Those two poems are relatively short; yet treat huge issues with great dignity. I know I'll never be able to do that, I really admire those poems and I read them a lot. Reading poems again, you know it's not like reading a novel. If I read a novel, I'm not going to say that I'll continue rereading this for the rest of my life‹except Ulysses I suppose and some novels you do‹but in the same way that you'll sing a song that you like over and over, I'll read a poem that I like over and over. There are lots of poems I return to.
It still seems to me that poetry is a great place to get into a stupor of admiration in a short space. It gets you there quicker than anything else. It's a bit like drinking beer and then drinking whiskey. Somebody described it as wine that's in prose, and wine distilled again to make brandy, which is poetry. It's a matter of taste, but I like the stronger taste of poetry.

Some of your poems rhyme and some don't. You've said you find the process of writing in rhyme liberating?

It is, yes. It sounds bizarre. I think in Ireland and England if you sometimes use rhyme, and then you don't, it's not really a huge issue. In America I think you have to nail your colours to the mast and do one or the other.
It is true for me that rhyme has been a process, not of control, but of letting go. New ideas come to me because they have to fit with the scheme. They say formal verse is for control freaks, but I don't think control freaks would write good formal verse. I think that once you get entangled with the form, you have to see where the form takes you. Somebody asked Yeats once where he got all his cosmic ideas, and he said it was from looking for his next rhyme. By the same token, you may have a wonderful line, it might be the best line you've written, but if it doesn't rhyme, bad luck, it's in the toilet. You have to be humble in front of language. It will let you do certain things, but not everything you want to do. So getting involved in form is a process of negotiation.

You've also said that some subjects don't lend themselves to rhyme.

I was very struck by something Bertholt Brecht said, when he said it would insult my subjects to rhyme. I think that's true. When I told you about the two poems that I so admire, 'Ghetto' and 'A Disused Shed in County Wexford', it's hard to see how you would do those poems in rhyme; it's hard to see how you would make them what they are. I like the freedom not to rhyme, not to write in strict forms from time to time. I do honestly think there are certain issues of decorum. Rhyme jingles. Musicality is not always appropriate. One of the great things about poetry is you can do both. Its concentration leads to both musicality and memorability. For memorability, you think about people like TS Eliot, I will show you fear in a handful of dust, marvellous lines like that, you don't quite know where they come from and you never forget them once you know them.
I would recommend everyone who has never tried rhyme to have a go. It's surprising where you'll end up. You start out with something in mind about where you'd like to go in a sonnet or whatever, but where you end up is going to be quite a different matter‹if it's going to be good.
There are a lot of forms where it seems to me it's hardly worth the effort. How many good sestinas are there really? Sometimes the demands of form just get silly; but sometimes the demands are facilitative. Stravinsky said art is the only area where all rules make you freer. Now, I don't entirely agree with that, but in certain areas that is true.

Again, I'm throwing things back at you, but you've said that the act of writing poetry is different for different poems. Is that all to do with rhyme and form, or are there other factors?

Yes, there are those things. There's one poem, the last one in this last collection, which is a relatively simple poem about a relatively simple event, but the event was terrible. It was a woman who had an autistic child and she committed suicide. She used to work for the NHS, and indeed her husband did as well, and I was writing the poem for an anthology for the NHS called The Gift.
My wife works as a psychotherapist with the NHS and she deals with a lot of autistic children and their parents. I wanted to write something about it, but the story was so overpowering. It overpowered me trying to write it, and I thought it would overpower the reader. What I did in the end was turn to an aspect of Japanese culture because they are more forgiving of acts like that. Also there is a play by Chickamatsu, The Sonezaki Love Suicides. Chickamatsu was famous for bringing real locations into his plays, and this involved a real location. I took a couple of lines from him and I wrote within that as simply as possible. That was a way of coping with the terrible nature of the material. I was rescued by form in that situation.

What can people expect when they pick up an Ian Duhig collection?

I hope people don't expect too much of what is inside. I would like it to be a bit of a surprise. I want to show that there is life in terms of poetry outside of universities. I want to connect with ordinary people in their ordinary lives. I know they will probably never look at any of my poetry, yet I want it at least theoretically to be something in which they recognise the society in which they live and the issues that they face.
In a way, I'm a hypocrite. Here I am employed by a university, and likely to continue to be employed by universities, but I do think that when universities set the agenda, it's not only uninteresting, but positively bad for the future of the art form. I think if poetry is entirely dictated by the academic trends of the day, it will lose its context in society, and it will lose its contact with those people I think it's important to keep attached to poetry. I don't want it just to be something that happens in universities, is looked at by university students, and is forgotten by university students.
I don't know how successful I am. I hear good reports. It may also be that a lot of ordinary people have read my poems and thought they stunk, but didn't tell me so. Whether I fail or not is not the issue. It does seem to me important to try. That's what I hope people will find in my latest book and maybe in the next one. It will be an attempt to keep concerned with issues that are not only of academic interest.

What can the individual poet do to maintain and strengthen the connection with the general public?

I think Ireland does it very well, to be perfectly honest. One of the things I like about being here is that there isn't the sense that poetry is an activity that takes place in ivory towers. People are doing different things. And because it's possible in Ireland, it must be possible in England, although it's a lot harder. I'd hate to think poetry is going to go into a state of hibernation for decades. In a way that's why it's so useful for me to be in Ireland: to see how it happens over here and to see how it survives in this way.
And part of it is a general welcomingness to ideas associated with poetry. It's a bit like that story about Auden - I don't know if it actually was Auden, but it could have been - where he said that if you're on a crowded train in England and you want more space all you have to do is mention to the person next to you that you're a poet, and he'll get off at the next stop.

How has your work evolved over time and through the collections?

I suppose when anybody writes a first book, they have ideas that have been simmering for a long time. My ideas were relatively general. They related to the work I was doing with homeless people in so far as I wanted the book to be literally all over the place, with people from all over the world involved in it. I suppose when I started writing, I also thought there is a very definite London-Irish identity, which is not the same as Irish and not the same as English, and I thought it would be a good vantage point to have a book about Ireland and England.
I've changed in terms of form. When you start doing things like that it makes a big difference. It's hard to say really. It's a bit like when people ask where poems come from. The best answer to that is Michael Longley's: If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there. It was a bit like that for me. There is no one place you can go to, like a goldmine, where you can extract poems for the rest of your life. You have to look all over the place, and in that process of looking you make connections that you wouldn't anticipate. I think that has been my strength. The books I've written have changed as different things have come along and I look at things differently.
Being a father made a difference to me. It changes everything when you become a parent, the nature of your responsibilities. In a strange sort of way, my father was Irish and I was London-Irish, but it never dawned on me until I was a father, how all of that would be completely meaningless to my child born in Yorkshire. There's no connection with London, never mind with Ireland.
And I suppose about that time, and I'm not entirely sure why, I wanted my poetry to be more straightforward and more immediately accessible to people. It's a mixture of things. What made a huge difference in terms of this book was working in the Northeast. There are loads of aspects of that area which just struck me. It seemed to me like writers' country. There was a part of it that used to be called the Debatable Land. What that meant was that nothing could be taken for granted. Is this land England or is it Scotland? Is it Graham land or is it Maxwell land? Is it private land or is it open common? Everything was negotiable. There was something about this contingent nature of being where you are that really struck me.
There were lots of other things I found remarkable. People think of the area around Newcastle as being just like Newcastle and I was one of those ignoramuses. You forget that it's a huge area, all of Northumbria, with a variety of traditions, and the vast majority of it is rural. When I was writing the book I would get asked to write about particular things and one of them was foot-and-mouth disease because that was a huge issue at the time. That was very hard for me to do as well, but I could hardly not respond to it. Part of the area I was responsible for included the Penrith Spur, which was the absolute centre of the contagion. It was a different sort of horror for people. It was loneliness. It was farmers killing themselves. I would ask people what was the first thing they noticed, and they'd say how quiet the countryside was. And I'd never really thought of the countryside as anything other than quiet. But there are qualities of silence, and this was a quality of fatal silence, the huge misery for individual lives.
If you're in any way tuned into society that makes differences too, that sets the agenda, and as I said before, I would rather my agenda was set by events in society rather than by whatever people seemed to be looking at in academia at the time.

You talk about going all over the place in search of poems. Would you be going to those places anyway, or are you specifically looking for subject matter for another poem?

It's a bit like that thing Napoleon used to say about his generals. People would recommend a man to him, and he'd ask, is he lucky? And that's a key thing: luck. Poets need a certain kind of luck. I suppose what I do is I go to a place where I think there might be the possibilities of a poem happening, and I hang around there to see if it happens. Lots of times it doesn't turn into a poem at all.
A book I've reread several times is a guide to reading tea leaves, which used to be a form of domestic devination in England until tea bags completely annihilated that. It was fascinating to read. The woman who wrote the book was saying how now that she's getting on a bit and her eyes aren't so good, she likes to use Darjeeling tea because it's got big leaves. Now unless you'd actually read that, you wouldn't get it, you can't deduce that. That's the sort of place I would look to; it might turn up in a poem later. I know it sounds peculiar, and it's like me saying you can't write formal verse without giving yourself over to it, but it's hard to predict what will end up as a poem.
Often something will come along and you'll end up writing a poem that is diametrically opposed to the one you'd originally thought you would write. Also, sometimes I'm a bit slow. Things have to settle for quite a long time before I understand what they might mean.
I spent a lot of time trying to get into a poem a magnificent mistake by Browning, the great Victorian poet. In the course of his poem, 'The Passes,' he manages to convince himself that the word 'twat' means the wimple of a nun. If you're going to make a mistake, make it a goodie. However, the fact that this is a sensational piece of information on its own doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to develop into any kind of poem. They talk about murdered darlings, and these are things and ideas in poetry and prose that are just so wonderful in their own terms that they can't be in a poem, because they would draw all the attention to themselves.

For the type of poet that you are, travel or living in different areas must be a good way of finding material.

I used to love the fact that when I lived in the North I lived in an area that was called the Holy Land. I just used to love saying it. Where do you live? Oh, I live in the Holy Land. There was Palestine Street, Jerusalem Road, and all the rest of it.
As I said before, when I was working in the North I still wasn't that interested in poetry, but I was fascinated by the area, and once again fascinated by the contrast between the culture in the city and the cultures in the country, down on the Antrim coast. And there was a lot going on. There are no good things that come out of a conflict like that in Northern Ireland, but sometimes the competition of people over the land makes it particularly rich; the same piece of land will hold significance and be full of stories for at least two communities, and often more than that.
There's a place called Islandmagee, northeast of Belfast. I went there and it had the most remarkable history. A great poem by John Hewitt, 'The Bloody Brae,' dealt with it. The ground is charged with more meaning than in other places. It's a bit like the Debatable Land in so far as there is an argument over it; there have been arguments over it for hundreds of years, and who knows how exactly they will be settled. The peace process has a long way to go yet. There's an Irish tradition, dinnseanchas, which is the stories of places, so you have that whole tradition plus all of the political upheaval in the North. It means things are important. It means when you say something about an area, you have a lot to say. For example in Islandmagee, which is now rock solid Protestant, they used to have this place called The Rince, which was the dance hall. And of course rince is the Irish word for dance. How the hell did they end up with an Irish name in an absolute rock solid Protestant community? The fact that that happens, I'm interested in that. You look into it and you find out a lot of history really and you find out something that is an aspect of history for both communities. When I went to Belfast it was for a job in the city, I had no idea of the country, so discovering all that was accidental.

So how then has it been in Dublin, apart from being at Trinity?

Well, I do come out occasionally.
Most of my relatives were country people and they had a very low opinion of jackeens, as they called the Dubliners, but we did have relatives here and we would come and see them, at least once, but more often two or three times a year. I remember Dublin as this place with quiet roads and virtually no traffic, broad pavements where you could wander along and kick a football if you liked. And now you walk out of Trinity College and the traffic, on pavements and on the roads, is the most intense that I've experienced outside of London on these islands. I'm used to some northern cities shrinking, places like Liverpool and parts of Newcastle, where the population just isn't there to sustain the place. But in Dublin you have a city that has got two or three times the population it was built for.
When you talk to people obviously it's about completely different issues than those to do with poetry. It's government corruption. Now I'm not sure if Irish politicians are any more corrupt than their British counterparts, but certainly it's an issue people are very exercised about. And issues to do with gangs, gang warfare. That's one of the first things Brendan Kennelly remarked upon when I was talking to him. And there's the general feeling that Dublin as a society has changed dramatically in the last ten years‹well, Ireland as a society, but Dublin in particular. And it is unrecognisable. It feels like it has a completely different agenda nowadays. Which in many ways is good‹it has the agenda of a modern European state‹but that's very, very different to the way I first came to know Dublin.

The Lammas Hireling is published by Picador. How did your relationship with them come about and does it make a difference being with a publisher of that size?

Well the reason I was keen on Picador is that I wanted to work with Don Paterson. He's the editor, and I don't think it's too much to say that he's the best editor of poetry in Britain. There are good poetry editors in Ireland obviously; Peter Fallon at Gallery may well be the best. But it was to work with a good editor. I must admit I think I need one because I do tend to wander for a bit and forget why anyone should be interested in why I'm writing about something at a particular time.
A good editor has no magic wand. We actually spent a longer time on this manuscript than I'd ever spent on any in the past. Don Paterson came to my house and I went up to stay with him in Scotland. It made a huge difference in me being able to achieve all the clarity I was looking for.
I don't know if it makes a huge amount of difference otherwise. I think one thing is that my new book is in the shops in England whereas the other books hadn't been. You know there's been a considerable process of dumbing down at Waterstone's. I suppose Picador has a little bit more clout, enough clout for me to get into the bookshops in England anyway. But that doesn't really make much difference to you as a poet. I think there are all sorts of things you might want to do as a poet - I'm sure this is true of most poets, it was certainly true of me - but what I really wanted was to be better at what I was doing. And sometimes you need someone from outside to help with that process and say well you need to do this, or if you say you want to be clear, then you can't do this. Or that is clear, but it's boring! And that process of changing things around is very important, and it did make a big difference.

So he's involved on that level?

Oh yes, very much. It is very much nuts and bolts sort of management. If you make one change, it has a knock-on effect. So what would start off as a small issue, quite often ends up with you having to readjust the verse, or two verses. And a lot of what he does is just ask what's going on here, what was on your mind when you were writing this? And it's very embarrassing when you've forgotten and there's no good reason for the thing being there. It does happen. You think why the fuck did I write that?
I needed help to be more like what I wanted to be, what I thought I wanted to be, so to have a sounding board at that late point in the manuscript was important. It is important too to have someone who knows what it's like to write poetry, so they're able to make practical suggestions. There's no point in someone saying, well, I didn't like this. In poetry workshops, reactions such as that are absolutely pointless. Specific feedback is vital.
I think that's the biggest difference. It's not just me saying that. One of the main reasons Picador has attracted the variety of poets that it has is Don.

Is he also involved in the shaping of the collection?

Not really, to be perfectly honest. That's another thing I was telling my group about. When you have your poems together and you look at one and say that this could be a last poem, or you may even have written one as a last poem, and that will then have implications for what goes before it. Sometimes, it's a big influence on the pattern of the whole book, working back like that. And you've probably got another poem that could be the first poem, or the second poem. I don't think it makes much difference what your twenty-ninth poem is like, frankly. But if you want to lead the reader through the book, having poems at key points which link to each other, and make it understandable, that's important.
I remember Paul Durcan described it well: he said that if you were an artist preparing for an exhibition, you'd put all your pictures up on the wall, and you'd look at them, and you might actually touch them up a little with different paint once you've seen them together. Sometimes you will look at them and they will imply another picture that you haven't painted yet and you will then go on to paint it. Sometimes that will happen with a poem. You'll see two or three together and think that you really need to finish the sequence.
When you put your poems in a book, you don't know them as well as you did before. Once the poems are to be published you have to start looking at them again. A lot of work we do on poems is to try to enable us to see them as outside us‹to see them at an angle from what we have produced. People talk about not being able to see the wood from the trees, but when you've written a poem you've grown the trees, never mind looking at the wood. You do need a new perspective to come back to them.
Another aspect is that the poems in a book are more or less contemporary with each other; they're more or less simultaneous. And if you put yourself into the experience of reader that makes a difference. Two poems that would apparently have nothing in common with each other, when they're put together suggest relationships, and sometimes it's a huge surprise.
With the last book it struck me how many of the poems related to suicide. There were a couple of poems that were specifically about that but they were about entirely separate situations. And then there was more attached to it. In the Northeast, the biggest immigrant community is the Chinese, and one of the things that's very popular now is dragon boat racing. You see all sorts of people dragon boat racing on the Tyne and the Wear and rivers like that, obviously not just Chinese people, people have taken it to heart. The ceremony is actually about the suicide of the great poet Qu Yuan, the first of the major poets to come out of China. The boats race to try to save him. He drowns himself because he couldn't with honour continue his involvement with the politics of the group that he was working with.
And unfortunately the northeast of England does have the highest suicide rate. It's much more a feature of ordinary life. And however stupid this sounds it was still a surprise to me how much suicide featured in poems in the book. Sometimes you just don't see it - you just don't see where it's taking you. [Laughs] Well, at least I don't, which might be a definition of me being a terrible poet.

Are you able to write while you're teaching?

Some people complain about that, but I haven't found it to be a problem. People are always interesting; there are aspects of almost everybody that will be interesting to me. I haven't filched off my students, although I've heard good things that I would like to have thought of. But sometimes there will be something that maybe reinforces something I've had on my mind, or something will come up which will be a solution to a different problem in my own writing.
Since I've been here though what I've been writing has been pretty much dictated. It's a commission to work with a composer to produce something that will go into a medieval play, The Play of Daniel. That was very set. It was likely to be in trochees because the Latin is in trochees. The composer also wants a couple of bits to be in iambic pentameter. I sent a draft into him recently and he said that's fine, it just needs to be twice as long. That's not normally the way you put poems together. I'm more used to cutting things out than putting things in.
There are other things that stick in my mind, which I'll put in my notebook. I was getting a lift back with Macdara Woods from a do the other night, and we were talking about how in Italy one of the local legends was that Ovid could read with his feet. I just think that's fantastic. I don't quite know why I like that so much, but I would be very surprised if that didn't end up in a poem. It's just one of those ideas, the shape of which has got poem written all over it.
So notebooks are involved. Not just for me but for everyone, for my students. You must have a notebook. There might be something that you're doing at the moment that stops you following an idea up, and there's no guarantee that it will stay there. My experience of poetic ideas is that they don't stand there waiting calmly until you're ready to receive them. You have to rush out and welcome them immediately even if you put them in your room to wait while you're doing these other bits.

When you're at home do you have a set routine of writing?

When I started I used to deliberately put myself into routines. I think it's good for everyone really. If you're going to learn an instrument, say if you're going to learn the saxophone, you don't just get it and practise for eighteen hours non-stop and expect to have made much progress. You have to accrue knowledge and expertise over a period of time.
When I worked in York I used to write on the train. And that actually turned out to be one of the best places, because as soon as the train was pulling out of the station, I would begin to get ideas. And when you're on a train - at least until mobile phones came along - you're in a little cocoon, you have no responsibility for the train getting there, and in the time that you're there, people can't reasonably expect you to do much else with your time.
I do try to encourage people to get into writing habits. One thing I do is I get up much earlier than a lot of my friends, because I find early mornings good for writing, when my head is very, very clear and I've got a couple of hours before I'm due to do anything else. So, although this might horrify your readers, getting up at five or six in the morning can be very good. Ghastly shock!

When were you aware that your class background was an issue in poetry?

I suppose I always knew it was an issue in poetry. One of the things that made me less enthusiastic about English poetry was how much it was tied to old-fashioned institutions. Oxford University, say, has had a variety of involvements in contemporary poetry, and it does seem to me that it's an unashamedly prejudiced institution. And I think what happens is that people who go there think that their expensive education is the most important qualification for dealing with poetry. I don't think that's necessarily true.
You see it in small things. I remember being on a tour with the poet George Szirtes and we were talking about football, and he was talking in a slightly manic way, and I asked him why, and he said that for the past twenty or thirty years since he started writing poetry, none of the people he met knew anything about football. They were rugby people and cricket people; they were Oxford people. It was almost like he had twenty or thirty years of chat building up in his mind. We were talking about players like Clive Best of West Ham, who stopped playing four years ago.
And it's also something to do with whether or not there's a welcoming attitude to poetry, and certainly from those institutions the attitude is far from welcoming. So I suppose I've always known it, and you can tell when you're reading poems if it's got anything to do with the world that you know. And most of the ones that I saw in school - and for a long time - weren't even related to a world that I was interested in.
Class has taken on a different dimension. People I know from a working-class background are very keen that I should write poems that rhyme, because that's what poems should be doing. Sometimes it seems to me that the tradition of the monologue in English poetry disappeared for a long while, decades and decades; it used to be a Northern tradition, it was something you could do at a party if you couldn't sing a song or tell a joke, the comic monologue.
So how class is constituting itself at the moment is interesting and different, but if you look at in terms of powerful institutions continuing to try to make the field their own, and muscle other people out of it, and dismiss other approaches to poetry, it's as outrageous today, it's still the same people doing it.

The Lammas Hireling has been nominated for the Forward Prize and now the TS Eliot Prize which will be announced in January. What does that mean to you?

Well, it brings me closer to a larger amount of money than I've been close to for some time. I can't say I have any real expectations of winning, but when I think about it, and this is going to sound appalling, but it's true, I think about it in terms of money. Prizes are nice and all the rest of it, but there's always going to be an argument about who is the best on any shortlist, but there's no argument about what you can do with ten thousand pounds.

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