For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.
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.
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.
