Harry Clifton – författare

At once a reckoning with a lost political legacy, a meditation on love, marriage and middle age, and a reaching back into foreign ancestry, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass is Harry Clifton''s fullest and most ambitious attempt so far to bring together, in a single book, the discordant elements of an evolving Ireland, as it discovers itself, through public and private destinies, in the 21st century. Harry Clifton is one of the finest and most widely travelled poets of his generation. He returned to Ireland in 2004, after sixteen years abroad, and began writing and publishing the poems that culminate, after seven years, in this timely new collection, which was shortlisted for the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award. He now lives in Dublin and was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2010-13. ''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.

This selection presents for the first time the thirty year trajectory of an acclaimed Irish poet who has lived and worked between the secular and the religious, Eros and history, Ireland and elsewhere, be it west Africa after civil war, south-east Asia after the Khmer Rouge or Europe at the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and whose extraordinary body of work has re-defined what it means to be Irish in the twenty-first century. Harry Clifton has published six other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012) from Bloodaxe, and Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (2007), winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, from Wake Forest University Press in the US. His other books include On the Spine of Italy (1999), his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, and Berkeley''s Telephone (2007), a collection of short fiction. ''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.

Portobello, the district in Dublin where the Irish poet Harry Clifton lives, is a microcosm of a changing, cosmopolitan Ireland. These sonnets, written on his return from sixteen years in continental Europe, are at once a celebration of place, a coming to terms with age and a rediscovering of the universal in the local. Harry Clifton has published seven other books of poetry, most recently The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014) and The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012) from Bloodaxe, and Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (2007), winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, from Wake Forest University Press in the US. His other books include On the Spine of Italy (1999), his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, and Berkeley's Telephone (2007), a collection of short fiction.

Portobello, the district in Dublin where the Irish poet Harry Clifton lives, is a microcosm of a changing, cosmopolitan Ireland. These sonnets, written on his return from sixteen years in continental Europe, are at once a celebration of place, a coming to terms with age and a rediscovering of the universal in the local. Harry Clifton has published seven other books of poetry, most recently The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014) and The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012) from Bloodaxe, and Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (2007), winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, from Wake Forest University Press in the US. His other books include On the Spine of Italy (1999), his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, and Berkeley’s Telephone (2007), a collection of short fiction.

Spiritual orphanhood, the loss and protection of innocence – from the first estates of Dublin to the karmic wastes of northern China – lie at the heart of this new collection by the eminent Irish poet Harry Clifton. Herod’s Dispensations shows his work now reaching beyond middle age, to revisit – in meditations on death and migration – the territories of the Far East from his early years, in the light of a new nomadic age. Harry Clifton has published nine other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014) and Portobello Sonnets (2017).

Spiritual orphanhood, the loss and protection of innocence – from the first estates of Dublin to the karmic wastes of northern China – lie at the heart of this new collection by the eminent Irish poet Harry Clifton. Herod’s Dispensations shows his work now reaching beyond middle age, to revisit – in meditations on death and migration – the territories of the Far East from his early years, in the light of a new nomadic age. Harry Clifton has published nine other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014) and Portobello Sonnets (2017).

For half a century of ever-broadening vision, award-winning poet Harry Clifton has addressed what the Irish Times calls ‘his large concerns and his angular relationship to Ireland, one that produces extraordinary verbal and emotional effects’. His latest book is a quest, through origin and migration, South America to the North of Ireland, Khao I Dang refugee camp to Glasnevin graveyard, for a lost maternal ground.Harry Clifton has published ten other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), Portobello Sonnets (2017) and Herod’s Dispensations (2019).

For half a century of ever-broadening vision, award-winning poet Harry Clifton has addressed what the Irish Times calls ‘his large concerns and his angular relationship to Ireland, one that produces extraordinary verbal and emotional effects’. This, his latest book is a quest, through origin and migration, South America to the North of Ireland, Khao I Dang refugee camp to Glasnevin graveyard, for a lost maternal ground.

Harry Clifton has published ten other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), Portobello Sonnets (2017) and Herod’s Dispensations (2019).

At once a reckoning with a lost political legacy, a meditation on love, marriage and middle age, and a reaching back into foreign ancestry, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass is Harry Clifton's fullest and most ambitious attempt so far to bring together, in a single book, the discordant elements of an evolving Ireland, as it discovers itself, through public and private destinies, in the 21st century. Harry Clifton is one of the finest and most widely travelled poets of his generation.

This selection presents for the first time the thirty year trajectory of an acclaimed Irish poet who has lived and worked between the secular and the religious, Eros and history, Ireland and elsewhere, be it west Africa after civil war, south-east Asia after the Khmer Rouge or Europe at the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and whose extraordinary body of work has re-defined what it means to be Irish in the twenty-first century. Harry Clifton has published six other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012) from Bloodaxe, and Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (2007), winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, from Wake Forest University Press in the US. His other books include On the Spine of Italy (1999), his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, and Berkeley's Telephone (2007), a collection of short fiction.

Ireland and Its Elsewheres is the next volume in UCD Press's The Poet's Chair series, publishing the public lectures of the Ireland Professors of Poetry. The Ireland Chair of Poetry was established in 1998 following the award of the Nobel Prize of Literature to Seamus Heaney and is supported by Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaion. Michael Longley's lectures were published in June 2015 and the next volume will contain the lectures of Paula Meehan. In this volume, the distinguished Dublin poet Harry Clifton - who has lived and worked all over the globe - focuses on locating himself and other Irish poets in relation to the literary traditions of Britain, Europe and the United States. Clifton opens by recounting his time living in London in the late eighties and early nineties. He discusses how he and a group of other poets were part of London's 'cultural clutter', and how their poetry reckoned with a time of great social and political upheaval in Britain. The second lecture focusses on Irish poetry's place in the 'eternal present' of Europe.Patrick Kavanagh and Thomas Kinsella are among the poets discussed in this illuminating comparison between neighbouring nations.Clifton closes the collection by extending his discussion on poetry to the United States - a land of exiles and immigrants. From Derek Mahon to Oscar Wilde, Clifton examines Irish poets in the New World, and describes how America has come to mean 'artistic posterity' for many of them. From one of Ireland's leading contemporary poets, this volume gives readers a rare insight into Irish poetry's place in the world.