Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

"I love American poetry even more than contemporary English poetry. I absolutely loved Stevens when I first read him. There’s something at the heart of his poems which is very abstract. He’s dealing with issues about what’s real and what’s imagined, and how you reconstruct the world endlessly through your imagination. They are very beautiful poems and poems that you can reread endlessly, because they are really about imagination and being in the world. They’re also odd poems. The early ones are quite florid, seemingly over the top, until you realise that he’s using language in an incredibly precise way. If I had to pick a book of poems for my desert island, I would probably end up with Wallace Stevens. No there isn’t, except to say that they are often poems which need to be read aloud. It’s very rare to find people who will admit to reading them aloud, because they look so strange on the page. But once you do read them aloud, they become much clearer. There is also the most beautiful poem about a pot – about placing a pot – called “Anecdote of the Jar”. So how can I not love Wallace Stevens? He wrote the best poem about a pot in any language ever. Not for a very long time. I haven’t got a third career up my sleeve as a poet. It would be hopeless."