Which poets do you admire?

My admirations are many and wide.

I admire Eliot and Auden and MacNeice and Mahon and Brodsky (in other people’s translation) most among the moderns; but there are other marvellous poets, such as Marilyn Hacker and Elizabeth Bishop.

These are just the English language ones: they are all in their ways singers of the real, which is to say the clutter and passion of ordinary life are important to them – but they are also formally virtuosic and capable of blowing the wind of imagination through the world.

There are many others: Don Paterson, Alice Oswald, the late Michael Donaghy, Ian Duhig are all younger than me.

American favourites include Wallace Stevens, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Anthony Hecht. And I haven’t looked back to previous centuries where apart from obvious ones such as Shakespeare, Donne, Keats etc, I love George Herbert, John Clare, Alexander Pope and the comic work of Byron. But this list could go on forever and I haven’t mentioned the foreign poets, including the Hungarians.

What inspires you?

The fragility, music and toughness of things. History with its monsters and losses, the visual arts with their sensory pleading and overload. Very simple things: rain, sunlight on the pavement, human love, the existence of animals, the whole notion of who we are and, more importantly, what we are and what the world is.

The music of what happens, in other words, and I’d expect most poets to say the same.

When and where do you write?

When I began in 1967 there were no computers but I had notebooks and a typewriter, a little manual one and later a big grey thing that sat on my desk and went ‘ching’ when the carriage reached the end and you had to pull at the lever to get it to return. Now I have a laptop and I try to get to it fairly quickly when something stirs. That is not difficult since I spend five days or so of the week at my desk with the laptop directly in front of me for about 12 hours each time with a few breaks.

Often I am translating fiction or poetry from the Hungarian. Like many Hungarians, or so it seems, I am a productive writer. It may come of being born in a small country with a language unlike anyone else’s so we have to try that much harder to make language work and to learn to love our work. I only write in English of course.

When I had a full-time job – I taught art and art history in schools for 15 years – I would set the alarm for 5am and spend a couple of hours reading or writing or redrafting or simply dreaming, it didn’t matter which, the important thing is that it was sacred time not to be used for anything else. No-one else in the house was up then. I was not closeting myself away. It was fresh and sent me to work with a clean conscience.