Why did you pick the Selected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins?

I have been a fan of Hopkins ever since somebody gave me the Selected Poems. This was when I was 28 or 29, having completed a BA in English literature but still not having any great sense of what poetry was actually all about. Strangely, I hadn’t read Hopkins during my degree. I was absolutely taken, for the first time in my life, by the music of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and it was the music that got me first because of the sensations going up and down my spine of the absolutely vivid revelation of what language can do. I remember spending most of the night, until four or five o’clock in the morning, trying to figure out what the poem was actually all about. It was a moment of extraordinary excitement for me.

An epiphanic moment?

Absolutely, a long moment. So it began to stir me and I read the Selected Poems from start to finish, trying to figure out each poem, because it wasn’t easy for me in those days, realising that not only were they absolutely great poems, but they spoke to me about what the deepest foundations of my own life were. I was brought up a very strict Roman Catholic in the west of Ireland and Hopkins appealed to me from that perspective. I was brought up in an extremely beautiful area – wild, passionate, huge Atlantic breakers and cliffs and so on – and I was free to roam as a child. So that Hopkins’s sense of the wonder of the physical universe also appealed deeply to me, and a lot of what I have been doing in my own work is actually trying to revisit Christianity rather than Catholicism and see how that relates to the physical universe in which I live and still take great pleasure.

Do you identify with the juxtaposition in Hopkins’s work of being both a poet and a priest?

Yes, I do. What seems to touch me most is his sense of Christ as a presence, an almost physical presence, and he equates that quite often with the physical universe: with the beauty of whales, for instance, where his lovely poems delight in nature. It always refers back to Christ, and for me, because of a certain loss of faith in the Roman Catholic tradition, I still wanted to hold on to what I found beautiful, lovely and moving in it, and that seems to boil down to the person of Christ and his words and language. Of course, Hopkins came to Dublin and wrote those wonderful, moving last sonnets – the desperate, tragic, sad sonnets – here in Dublin. So I have always felt a huge empathy with him.

Do you relate to his compassion, in a poem like ‘Felix Randal’ for example?

Absolutely. These poems are desperate attempts to find a relationship with the world. He was an extremely intelligent, bright probing man and in late 19th-century England and in Ireland that sort of exploration was not acceptable: you stood by what you were given and that was it. So he was exploring. The language that he uses conveys that physical sense – it is almost granite-like, hewn and still fluid. I find all of that mesmerising.

It’s his insistence on the sound of his poetry that’s so amazing.

It’s frighteningly good and inimitable. When I was writing early on, I found I was imitating Hopkins, and it took quite a long time to recognise that was what I was doing. And of course it was a wonderful failure.

It’s interesting, the influence of other voices on a poet. Presumably it’s part of the creative process?

Yes, it is. For a long period of time I had the poetry bug but something wasn’t working; I was doing the Hopkins thing and it wasn’t working, but then by sheer chance I came across Tomas Tranströmer, the old Penguin copy, in English translation by Robert Bly.

So we are looking at Tomas Tranströmer’s New Collected Poems?

Yes. The very first poem is called ‘Preludes’: ‘Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams’. That was totally new to me, just like T S Eliot’s poem ‘Let us go then you and I…’ It stopped me in my tracks and I found myself opening up my imagination, trying not to force what I was doing, trying to let the language and the experience work for themselves without either imposing my Christian viewpoint on it or a Hopkins influence on it. The words that were used about my work after that experience were that I had become permeable, as opposed to impermeable. Permeable allows the world in and language can look after itself. I know that I owe that opening of my imagination to reading Tomas Tranströmer.

Subsequently, I wrote a poem and it was the beginning of writing anything good. It was called ‘Winter in Mead’. My wife had died, and in 1981, about a year after her death, came this wonderful winter of snow and frost.