Description
Book SynopsisSpiritual 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).
Trade Review'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.
Table of Contents9 To the Next Generation 10 Redesdale Estate, 1956 12 Endgame 14 The Accursed Questions 15 After Mao 16 Across the River 17 Ruins 19 Daytime Sleeper 21 The Egg-wife 22 Therese and the Jug 24 Before Christ 25 A Flight into Egypt 26 Pity and Terror 28 Art, Children and Death 29 Disfavour 31 The Stage-door 32 The Achill Years 34 Horace 35 The Bible as Literature 37 At Racquets 38 The Pit 40 Wreckfish 42 The Dry-souled Man 44 Trance 46 Auden in Shanghai 47 Anabasis 49 from Red Earth Sequence 54 Zhoukoudian 56 Come and See Us Sometime 57 To the Philippians 58 Toronto Suite 59 Ballinafull, 3 July 2014 60 Death’s Door 61 Goodbye to China
