For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
'The Haunted Man' is about communication barriers between men and women, and in that song it's a woman's wait for her husband to come back from war. The vision for me was of a group of men and women on the opposite sides of two cliffs, trying to move or sing to each other and communicate, but they're kind of misfiring.
I remember, even in college, reading Cliffs Notes about a book and thinking to myself, 'Geez, that sounds like a good book. I should probably read it.'
The child now shewed her a narrow and rugged descent, made by cutting the red clay and stones, of which the cliffs are here composed, into a sort of rude steps.
Being a sculptor who uses found objects, all the objects I use in my work have been designed by other people. So I'm tweaking them in some way by squashing them or throwing them off cliffs! Then I formalise my damage by suspending them or arranging them in some kind of way. So I'm using other people's design in a way, so I'm an 'un-maker.'
A lot of my work has been about stuff I've been frightened of: cliffs, explosions, meteorites, that kind of stuff. I would have been this trembling blob of fear if I hadn't got into making art, which is a good way of deferring it.
As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.
Think Oman, and you think desert. But what we found was mile after mile of barren, spiky rubble, cliffs of jutting sharp rocks, unrelieved by a single piece of vegetation or water. We drove for hours across what felt like the surface of the moon. We saw goats foraging but couldn't work out what they could possibly be eating.
The Dorset coast, where I spent my childhood, is a gorgeous place to run. I love to explore and revisit places like the cliffs at Kimmeridge Bay and the abandoned village of Tyneham.