The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe's finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house.
It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.
I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.
The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email.
As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.
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.
