My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

If nature offers no home, then we must make a home one way or another. The only question is how.

What advice do I tell my grandson? I listen to him.

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.

Souls of poets dead and gone, / What Elysium have ye known, / Happy field or mossy cavern, / Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? / Have ye tippled drink more fine / Than mine host's Canary wine?

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thought and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains.