There’s an extraordinary range of subjects and forms in this book. A continuum, maybe, between poems like “Photomontage” and “Owls and Foxes,” and poems like “Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Antiparos, 30 July 1700.” Is it fair to say that you travel in these poems between a here-and-now immediacy and a contemplation of the past?

In truth, poetry only has one tense: the present. Figures from the past — Goethe, Keats, Tournefort, Sir William Hamilton — are living figures in my present. I write about them because they help me orientate myself in the here and now. Other poems, having to do with love or grief for people close to me, are more obviously “of the present”; but “The Woman in the House,” though it opens with a classical statue and draws mostly on nineteenth-century French painters and their models, is just as present to me as, say, “Elm Seeds.”

Several of your poems are meditations on visual art. They are essentially aesthetic responses to aesthetic responses. The reader gets the sense of drilling down through layers of time and perception. (I think of the title poem, “Nine Fathom Deep,” which you note is “after Doré after Coleridge.”) What is it that attracts you to this kind of subject?

See above. Some visual art has given me figures just as literature and travel-writings have. In “Nine Fathom Deep” itself I was drawn particularly to the man and woman in Doré’s engraving who lie, as it seems, embracing and asleep on the seabed, among the wrecks.

What do you think about the quality of historical consciousness in contemporary poetry?

In truth, poetry only has one tense: the present. Figures from the past — Goethe, Keats, Tournefort, Sir William Hamilton — are living figures in my present.

I worry sometimes that there is not enough of it. Myself, I need a historical consciousness every bit as much as I need consciousness of the foreign, of abroad. No poet is nowhere. It is best to try to understand where you are and to establish and profit from the connections. This question widens into one concerning readership, shared culture and tradition.

Are there other poets who display the kind of historical consciousness you’re talking about?

In English Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill… But several younger poets, women and men, are trying very seriously to locate themselves in our fraught and uneasy culture – and that entails understanding where you are from as well as where you are now.

If you can step back a moment and see the main threads in your work, how do you see yourself in relation to current “British literature”?

I feel myself to be marginal. Not eccentric, just not in the mainstream or anywhere near the centre (wherever that might be). But I have a much stronger sense of belonging, however unimportantly, to a tradition of English verse – clearest in the Romantics, Clare, Hardy, Owen, Edward Thomas, Graves … And, although very English, I owe much to many foreign poets, among them Hölderlin and Brecht.

I’m surprised by your mention of Brecht. What do you owe him, as opposed (let’s say) to Hölderlin? (Or am I in danger of succumbing to a binary?)

Brecht was a great admirer of Hölderlin. The first play he wrote and staged when he came back out of exile was a version of Hölderlin’s very diffcult translation of Antigone. They have in common a radical objection to any social order that denies its people their full humanity, reduces them to commodities, stunts and depraves them, and a passionate wish for a society, as Brecht puts it, “worthy of human beings.” I share that objection and that wish. Both are great lyric poets (Brecht an even better poet than he is a dramatist), I translate both and learn and learn.