Harry Clifton

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Harry Clifton is an Irish poet. He was born in Dublin but has lived in Africa and Asia, as well as more recently in continental Europe. He has published five collections of poems in Ireland and the United Kingdom, including The Liberal Cage (1988) and The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973–1988 (1992).[1]

Wake Forest University Press, Clifton's publisher in North America, published his newest volume, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004, in 2007, which won the 2008 The Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His poems have been translated into several European languages, and Le Canto d’Ulysse, his selected poems in French, was published in 1996. Among many awards, he has received the Patrick Kavanagh Award, two Arts Council Bursaries in Literature, and The Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the top poetry prize in Ireland.[2]

Clifton was an International Fellow at the University of Iowa, has represented Ireland at the Iowa International Writers’ Program, and has been Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place in New Hampshire. He returned to Ireland in 2004, and now teaches at University College Dublin. He is a member of Aosdána.[3]

[edit] Critical commentary

“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. This is a splendidly rich book.” C.K. Williams

“He is home now, one of the most respected Irish poets ... and evidently absorbed in the perennially fruitful themes of ‘exile’and return. ... Seriousness and drollery, adventure and achievement, are all here. He’s already gone much of the way, and looks set to ‘go the distance’. Secular Eden should win his work the attention it deserves.” Derek Mahon, The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“Secular Eden is full of figures in transit—freedom fighters in the forests and fields, travellers and refugees, even the lovers in the breathtakingly beautiful title poem—because transit is the very stuff of history: nothing in the world is constant, other than change, and Clifton gives himself over to this Heraclitean flux in poems that are both well-crafted and spontaneous, necessarily doomed attempts to capture the fleeting show.” John Burnside, The Irish Times

“His dazzlingly accomplished book is arguably the first great work of Irish poetic post-modernism. ... A major writer is one who has escaped the anxiety of influence. Few achieve this by being completely original, and poets in particular are in a constant dialogue with the past. But Clifton achieves it in a paradoxically original way, by capturing with masterful fluency the sense of a world in which everything has happened before and been written before. His is a universe of aftermaths, hauntings and returns, in which even God (in the delightful poem God in France) dreams of becoming flesh again, as he did once before.” Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times

“.…the achievement of several years’ work… with great profundity to the poems in how they explored ideas… and a real sense of vocation in the collection.” The Irish Times Poetry Now Award

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