David Duchovny uses poetry to try and nail down the "mystery" of his feelings.

The 65-year-old actor is best known for playing Fox Mulder in The X-Files, but has published seven books since 2015, including novels such as Truly Like Lightning and Miss Subways - and his latest tome, About Time, marks his first foray into published poems.

David told People about the motivation behind the project: "I'm just trying to ponder from my particular point of view at that moment, and get to the heart of something.

"That's what a poem is to me: I've got this feeling, it's around this thing, or this event, or this person, and now I want to put that in a form that makes sense in some way, you know, deal with this mystery of this feeling."

Acclaimed poet and memoirist Mary Karr has described David's debut poetry collection as "a helluva book of poems".

David added the project grew slowly as he revisited his notebooks and drawers filled with earlier work.

He said: "It was interesting to go back through all the drawers and notebooks and files and find poems that I'd forgotten I'd written, some of them made it in (to the book) and some of them should never have been written."

David also explained he views poetry as an honest attempt to capture fleeting emotions.

He added: "You do the best that you can in the moment that you're doing it. And that's both great and horrible, because you don't have the long perspective, so you just have what you're immersed in, and there's a certain kind of joy in that, in that blindness. A certain kind of honesty."

The collection features poems ranging from single-line fragments to longer ruminations.

David said he hoped readers would approach the book as they might a gallery visit.

He went on: "It's like when I go to any great museum. I can't see all the paintings, you know? Even though I might want to, because I don't know when I'll be back, it's like diminishing returns after a while.

"You just get kind of overwhelmed and overstimulated, so I think poems are like that, because they're dense like painting."

Comparing poetry to other forms of writing, he said: "Novels are a more straightforward journey: there's a beginning, a middle and an end.

"But poems are more about interrogating a feeling.

"Scripts are more like poems than you would think, because they're less like novels, because there's not a lot of descriptive writing.

"There's some descriptive writing, but not pretty descriptive writing. It can be more like writing poetry than not."