During my twenties and thirties, my interest in the political poem increased as my apparent access to it declined. I sensed resistances around me. I was married; I lived in a suburb; I had small children.

In my thirties I found myself, to use a colloquial fiction, in a suburban house at the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Married and with two little daughters, I led a life which would have been recognizable to any woman who had led it and to many others who had not.

Well, I've got two small children and this is a very important time for me to be around them.

I'm really terrible with small children; they're small, noisy, irritating, damp and soggy.

I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.

One of the things women poets have been engaged in - among the other things they've been doing - is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem.