KL: You often use Edenic references very explicitly and have poems taking up the story of the Garden and exploring the expulsion from Eden.

RA: ‘Further Thought’ has something to do with Genesis, at least at the poem’s beginning. I was raised in a religious house. At least my mother was religious. I don’t think my father was, but my mother dominated that sphere. So, I was raised reading the Bible and attending an evangelical church. I mean, I’m not religious. Sometimes, friends of mine even ask me about my use of the word God and say, do you believe in God? And I keep saying, ‘No, not in a God you could pray to, not in anything Judeo-Christian or anything you could give a name to.’ I think when I use the word God, I just mean everything we don’t know. A sort of WTF, you know, is my God. But yes, that comes very naturally to me. Harking back to the Genesis story or other creation myths, I tend to mix it up with cosmology too and with physicists’ attempts to develop a theory of the beginning of the universe.

KL: It seems like it’s just part of your repertoire. And, as you say, it’s associated with your early life and your maternal relationship. And you don’t necessarily know this as a reader. I didn’t realise this until I read an interview where you said you weren’t religious because it’s unusual to have that going on, I think, when you’re not religious.

RA: Yes, probably.

KL: I think it’s very interesting that you use that material. It’s part of what you’ve got.

RA: It’s my toolset, right? Well, I think that’s why I’m interested in science because it’s just another way of trying to conceive of how we got here and how things started. When I was a little girl, I used to be fascinated by the idea of space, and I wondered how there is an end to space, but also how empty space could go on forever. So, things like that would just drive me crazy. And religion supposedly answers those questions, but if you don’t have religion then what? Then the questions come back. And that’s why I started reading books about physics and cosmology. They don’t have answers either. They may have answers, but not answers they’re sure of. I mean, the answers change, which is good. It’s good when answers can change.

KL: Well, I love the story you’ve told in various interviews that you were explicitly drawn into poetry when your teacher gave you the Untermeyer anthology. Like all this evangelical stuff, that’s all grist to your mill – and it’s all extremely poetic. Along with this developmental narrative, if you like, because there’s a whole sort of developmental narrative going on in the book about your twin granddaughters, there are other narratives embedded in the book. Other narratives can be extrapolated that are, at least to some extent, private. You talk about privacy, or you sometimes write about privacy. One of the things I think that’s so interesting and curious about lyric poetry is that insofar as it courts or produces a certain experience of intimacy – it’s equally an assertion of privacy.

RA: Yeah …

KL: You can’t know – your attention is drawn to what you can’t know or say, but in that space of not-knowing, something else can take place, and this is, I think, undoubtedly crucial to the love of poetry.

RA: I do, too. Sometimes, people ask me if I know how a poem will go or if I see the end or where I want to end when I start, and I usually answer: ‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t start at all.’ It’s not about certainty. It’s about the absence of certainty, which draws me in. I guess I didn’t really answer your question about private narratives … but then they wouldn’t be private.