At the heart of your new collection, Up Late, lies the magnificent, moving title sequence about your father Alastair’s death during Covid, which won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Was writing it cathartic?
I don’t know about cathartic exactly, but it gave me something to do for the 10 days my father was dying. When my mother died in Newry hospice many years ago I spent the last few days with her, sleeping in the room, and couldn’t write about that until many months later. But with my dad, because it was Covid, we weren’t allowed in with him in the hospital in Antrim, or to even stay in his house in Cookstown, which had to be “disinfected” apparently. So I stayed in London and, not fit for company, sat in my writing shed at the end of the garden and wrote through it.
Boris Johnson’s behaviour during Covid sealed his fate as British prime minister. Brexit is his other legacy. How do you view him?
I’d like to be more polite but I think he’s a piece of sh*t. A black hole of a human. An arrogant, self-interested man-baby.
Elsewhere, you wrote of the salmon of knowledge/ a poem understandably swimming away from you because “I would eat it for its secrets”. Is guilt part of being a writer?
Yes, maybe a bit. Though I was lucky enough to have parents who didn’t read my books, or if they did, never mentioned them. My dad liked to claim he’d never read a whole book. He said he started a Dick Francis novel once on holiday, but didn’t like it.
“I know that every evil act I ever saw committed had at its core identity.” Have you managed to construct an identity that transcends or defies this?
I don’t know about that. But I do know that we already did identity politics in Northern Ireland and it didn’t work out so well. And while we were waiting around for Northern Ireland to become more like the rest of the world, the rest of the world turned into Northern Ireland: partisan, oppositional, identity-focused. I believe in liberal ideals, and I’m not interested in emphasising or creating differences that lead to divisiveness. I’m interested in the rich and varied individual, and in universal values, not tribal allegiances.
You are from Tyrone and divide your time between New York city and London. How does that shape you as a writer?
I live in London now (we moved back during the pandemic, after a decade in New York) and teach in Belfast. I don’t know whether I can identify how it shapes me exactly, though. I left way back in 1994 to go to university in England, and over the last 20-something years have lived and worked in Boston, Warsaw, Rome, London, Paris and New York. Now I’m back on the street in Willesden my wife grew up on. I know that Joyce thought the quickest way to Tara was via Holyhead, and there’s something in that perhaps. It was definitely helpful to me to leave Northern Ireland to get a perspective on it.
You are Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. How big an influence was he?
Huge. We read him at school, and his work opened a door into poetry for me. I’m still exploring the house.
You are married to the novelist Zadie Smith, who you met at Cambridge University, and you co-wrote a children’s book, Weirdo. Does it help being married to a writer? Do you influence each other’s work?
Well, you can say, leave me alone, I’m writing, and the other person slinks away without reproach. Or you can turn on the light at 2am and say I need to write something down, and the other person doesn’t complain. There’s an understanding there. We still read and edit each other’s stuff, though less than we used to. I don’t know about influence but we’ve been in each other’s pockets for almost 30 years and talk all the time about books so we must have done at some level.
You attended the same Cambridge college as Oliver Cromwell and his head is buried there. Did you ever contemplate writing about him, like Brendan Kennelly did?
Yes, I’ve contemplated it, and have a few ideas about a historical thing set in Ireland. We’ll see.
What projects are you working on?
A few things. A TV series with my wife and a director which will, I’m sure, come to nothing. And I curate a poetry festival in New York that I’m finalising. And I’m working on a book of essays about poetry – a kind of unhelpful self-help book. Each chapter takes a theme – like failure, for example – and looks at what poets have made of it. Larkin features a lot in the failure chapter: he was the patron saint of failure.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I have. The most recent was last summer when I was driving up from West Cork to Donegal to see family in Ballyshannon and we stopped at Thoor Ballylee. It was a magical place, though I managed to annoy a man in a tractor who couldn’t get past my car.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Flaubert’s is pretty good: Words are like hair; they shine with combing.
Up Late is published by Faber & Faber
