Herod's Dispensations

Harry Clifton was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2010-13. His books include Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks (Wake Forest University Press, USA, 2007), winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, and five titles from Bloodaxe, among these, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), shortlisted for Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), The Portobello Sonnets (2017) and Herod’s Dispensations (2019). After many years travelling and living Africa, Asia and Europe, he now lives in Dublin.

'There is so much history in Harry Clifton's poems, so much geography, landscape, cityscape, repeopled precincts of the imagination, so much human drama and comedy; so many people, mythic, unlikely and hauntingly real. And all of it is limned with a masterful formal dexterity and an apparently limitless cultural curiosity' – C.K. Williams.; 'The poems begin with something seen, remembered, or suddenly known, or a melancholy feeling about time passing, or complex emotions about love, and then they take a longer view, or hold their breath while a new tone, filled with sonorous risk and odd wisdom slowly seeps into an end-line of a stanza or a new section of a poem… There are moments when you hold your breath… and you sit up in pure delight… there are a number of poems in this book that will be read as long as any poems are read anywhere… The last poem, "Oweniny, Upper Reaches", filled with soft, haunting cadences and strange, ambiguous musings on solitude, memory and the meaning of things, is a masterpiece. It displays Clifton’s reticence and technical skill against the need to let the poem soar into a truth that emerges from the gap between the words, and then it allows the words themselves to glide up and out in all their hushed and controlled beauty' - Colm Tóibín, Irish Times on The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.; `His dazzlingly accomplished book is arguably the first great work of Irish poetic post-modernism… His is a universe of aftermaths, hauntings and returns, in which even God…dreams of becoming flesh again… an Irish voice that is utterly contemporary in its restless movement through time and space’ – Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times on Secular Eden.

• 9 To the Next Generation10 Redesdale Estate, 195612 Endgame14 The Accursed Questions15 After Mao16 Across the River17 Ruins19 Daytime Sleeper21 The Egg-wife22 Therese and the Jug24 Before Christ25 A Flight into Egypt26 Pity and Terror28 Art, Children and Death29 Disfavour31 The Stage-door32 The Achill Years34 Horace35 The Bible as Literature37 At Racquets38 The Pit40 Wreckfish42 The Dry-souled Man44 Trance46 Auden in Shanghai47 Anabasis49 from Red Earth Sequence54 Zhoukoudian56 Come and See Us Sometime57 To the Philippians58 Toronto Suite59 Ballinafull, 3 July 201460 Death’s Door61 Goodbye to China