"As much as most kids growing up I liked digging for buried treasure, and when there was no buried treasure to be found, I buried some myself for later discovery. I think of my subjects the same way: they like hiding things, and they may even have a sneaking admiration for the one who finds them out. In his 1995 Paris Review interview, Ted Hughes confessed: "Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn't actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it's the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic--makes it poetry. The writer daren't actually put into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies ... we're actually saying something we desperately need to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don't have that secret confession, you don't have a poem--don't even have a story."