Richard Murphy is now 73, and his face is still striking and unusual; a face full of character which you'd turn discreetly to have a second look at. People are doing just that in the Shelbourne, where we have arranged to meet. I'm early, but he's earlier still, and he stands up formally to shake hands with manners that clearly come easy as breathing.

1940-41. A blissful period on the beautiful Cromwellian demesne (Milford House). The children have private tutors: Sally Stokes, an intellectual disciplinarian, who had been a playmate of C.S. Lewis in Belfast; she changes Richard's interest from music to poetry, to Milton, Wordsworth and Eliot. The other tutor, a Classicist who looks like a Viking, is Thomas Thackberry; he has taught in many of Ireland's public schools.

This is an extract from academic Maurice Harmon's Bio- graphical Extract on Murphy, which was published in the Irish University Review in 1976. Three ornate sentences which give something of the flavour of Murphy's classic Anglo-Irish upbringing. "We are an endangered species," Murphy says. Born in Milford House in Galway, he spent most of his childhood years in Ceylon, where his father was the last British mayor of Columbo. He cites his first memory as "Trying to embrace the world outside the demesne walls."

Embraced the world is what Richard Murphy has done ever since; scrambling over Connemara walls, sailing hookers, renovating houses, buying islands, travelling far, and, all the while, writing poems. His Collected Poems is published by Gallery Press today, with some 15 new sonnets, several small revisions of earlier poems, and some drafts that finally transformed into poems.

"I wrote poetry all my life to try to make something last," he says. "I wrote about people I loved. Poetry is the best way of remembering through words people we love." Do poets know their own strengths best? Certainly, reading through the Collected Poems, among those which resonate loudest are several fine poems to the memory of his close friend Tony White, who died young; bittersweet poems to his ex-wife, who separated painfully from him not long after their marriage; the grand elegy to the lost Cleggan fishermen of 1927; the poem which marks Theodore Roethke's troubled stay on Inishbofin with perfect pitch.

On a wet night, laden with books for luggage,

And stumbling under the burden of himself,

He reached the pier, looking for a refuge.

Murphy also writes beautifully about Connemara. His poems are constructed snug and satisfyingly tight as stone cottages. Sometimes they come infused with a shiver similar to that experienced when you are walking away from a house you think is empty, and you look back and see a line of smoke rising from the chimney.

In `Little Hunger', he writes of looking for stone from ruins to build his own granite house. The poem ends:

Once mine, I'd work on their dismemberment,

Threshold, lintel, wall;

And pick a hearthstone from a rubble fragment

To make it integral.

Murphy, whose main publisher has always been Faber, is not forthcoming as to why it is Gallery, rather than Faber, who are publishing the Collected. "Simon Armitage is on record as saying Faber publish their books on recycled toilet paper," he comments acidly. Yes, but Faber has an international name . . . He lifts his cup of Earl Grey and simply says how indebted he is to editor Peter Fallon, and later, to poet and friend Dennis O'Driscoll, whom he cites as "having an unerring ability to put his finger on the weak word."

Every poet has certain poems that readers think of first. With Murphy, it has to be `The Cleggan Disaster' and `Sailing to an Island'. A good poem never ages, the lines still glint untarnished across the years, such as those that open `The Cleggan Disaster':

Five boats were shooting their nets in the bay

After dark. It was cold and late October.

The hulls hissed and rolled on the sea's black hearth

In the shadow of stacks close to the island.

`The Cleggan Disaster' has resonances in literature beyond being Murphy's signature poem. The poem won the Cheltenham Prize in 1962, and one of the judges who chose it was Sylvia Plath. From a distance, she was beguiled by the west of Ireland sea-washed aura of that poem and others of Murphy's. In July, she wrote to tell him that his poem had won, and to ask if there was "any chance of Ted and me coming to Bofin . . . I have always desired, above many things, a friend with a boat."

Plath and Hughes did visit that September, and Murphy put them up, sailed them to Inishbofin on his boat, brought them to both Lady Gregory's Coole Park and Yeats's Thoor Ballylee, and played the host until Hughes went to fish with the painter Barrie Cooke in Clare - and Plath departed abruptly shortly after for England.

Ten years ago, Murphy contributed a memoir fragment about that visit to Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson's controversial biography of Plath. Murphy reports that Plath made a pass at him while in Ireland.

What kind of reaction did he get to it? Murphy's face contorts, and he speaks quickly. "Ted asked me to write it. I wrote it as if I had my hands tied behind my back, giving evidence to the jury. It was being said in America that Ted brought Sylvia to the west of Ireland and then abandoned her there without money or tickets, which was not the case, as I explained." He pauses, looking weary.

"I'm going to revise that piece now that both of them are gone," he continues. "It was not written with freedom. What disturbed me about the incident was the violation of hospitality - one of my guests was asking me to betray my other guest, her husband. I wasn't blaming her as a woman for making a pass. People have said I blamed her for unfeminine conduct. But it wasn't that; it was the fact they were both guests in my house."

And, if circumstances had been different, would he have wanted to explore the opportunity that Plath offered him? "No, no, no. I found her a fascinating person, but no."

Murphy later wrote `Lullaby' for Shura Wevill, the small daughter of Assia Wevill, whom she took with her when she committed suicide after the breakdown of her subsequent relationship with Hughes: a spare and tender lyric of elegy, like a cradle in which to rock the memory of the lost child.

Three years ago, Murphy sold his house in Dublin to help his only daughter, Emily, her husband and their children Theodora (9) and Caspar (6) move to South Africa. He now lives most of the year near them in Durban. "In South Africa I have a huge and beautiful house that would cost me as much as a cattle shed outside Tullamore, where I am disturbed only by peacocks. And sometimes monkeys," he adds as an afterthought. "One is spoiled, really."

You suspect he has many good stories. He tells, for instance, of finding letters to the philosopher Wittgenstein serving as draught excluders in the turf shed of Quay House at Rosroe on Killary Fjord, which Wittgenstein had rented some years previous to Murphy's own arrival in 1951. He writes about it in `Killary Hostel', a place:

Nailed to this wild coast...

He left, in my turf-shed rafters, a small sign

To question all our myths . . . Dear Wittgenstein."

Wittgenstein apparently loved birds, and had left money with the still-resident caretaker to feed them after his departure. "But he had made them so tame, the cats ate them," Murphy recounts. "When the great man is gone, the disciples get gobbled up . . . "

He is currently writing his memoirs for the Granta publishing house, which will be edited under publishing director, Neil Belton's keen eye, and which are due out in 2002. He is working from photocopies of papers and notebooks: the originals are now held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "I feel a real need to hurry and finish it," he says. "Seeing the Collected out makes me feel young and happy. I only wish more of my friends were alive to share my pleasure."

Richard Murphy's Collected Poems is published today by Gallery Press. He will give a reading in Waterstone's, Dawson St, at 5.30 p.m.