‘I think about the woodland. I think about bars of morning sunlight, bobbing with life; aphids and spores. I think about the bulk of the herd moving through the undergrowth, gracefully, like whales through water.’

‘Maddie came to meet me in her jeep to collect me from town and I thought here’s a woman for whom no poems have been written.’

‘The daughter belongs to another world, she’ll not stay long in this one. She looks like Isak Dinesen at the end of her siege with love.’

‘When Gabe wouldn’t talk as a baby, oh man, did we have excuses. Same as now. Colleen wants to know where we’ve been, have we sided with Connor? She’s at the door in denim.’

‘We walked slowly and sometimes into each other because we’d been drinking five dollar buckets of beer all day. A child had ferried the beer to our sun loungers as soon as we waved a hand and this we found amusing and it had opened up our wallets.’

‘I don’t know how it is in Ireland now, but here if you want to see old people and babies, go to Mass.’