Description
Book SynopsisPortobello, 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.
Trade ReviewClifton’s civilised appreciation of the cosmopolitan fluidity of his chosen place is matched by the fluency of these sonnets… Clifton’s is a sophisticated and humanistic imagination, alert to the saving human detail and at some level always in search of the bigger picture. His work is ridden by time and the sense that there is nothing new under the sun except the capacity for seeing the world afresh. -- Sean O'Brien * Guardian *
In Harry Clifton’s magisterial Portobello Sonnets (Bloodaxe Books), the everyday life of Portobello is seen in the light of his unflagging poetic quest. It is heartening to see the poet striking out, undaunted, into new imaginative territory. -- Michael O’Loughlin * The Irish Times, Books of the Year *
These thirty-five sonnets from 2004-05, running in their narrow grooves, remain a remarkable achievement, and they also show him firmly claiming the poet’s privilege of remaining on the edge… his voice in Portobello Sonnets claims a poetic authority as willed, as unambiguous, as James Clarence Mangan’s. -- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin * Dublin Review of Books *
Table of Contents1 'Dublin under sea-fog, dreeping weather...' 9 2 'Look me up, with the blind, the lame and the halt...' 10 3 'Overnight snow in the east...' 11 4 'Tell me, does anyone ever get blind drunk...' 12 5 'How to survive the dangerous Dublin stretch... 13 6 'The envelope, bright yellow or bright blue... 14 7 (Death of an Editor) 15 8 'The man in here, demanding time and silence...' 16 9 'When you emerge from the other end of books...' 17 10 'They frighten me slightly, those nice boys and girls...' 18 11 'Who was it said we're born in the second act?' 19 12 (To the singer Freddie White) 20 13 'Linoleum, yellow light...' 21 14 'Rogue narcissus, how did you get in there...' 22 15 'Clouds, too, are incoming information...' 23 16 'What feeds the secret sources?' 24 17 'Is there a lockkeeper here, who understands...' 25 18 'These are the days that March has lent to April...' 26 19 'Crunch of a car, in the gravelled yard below...' 27 20 'Not for us high priesthood, Dan and I...' 28 21 'With Jeremiah's lamentations sung...' 29 22 'The Pope and Rainier dead, Saul Bellow dead...' 30 23 'Dim snugs, in coloured little towns...' 31 24 'People I meet, on the blind wheel of fortune...' 32 25 'I have it in mind, North African gentlemen...' 33 26 'Sitting still, or hurtling through the noosphere...' 34 27 'Weeping, I feel better...' 35 28 '"'I saw an extraordinary thing, the other day..."' 36 29 (For Marina, who cut my hair) 37 30 'Ask yourself, as you struggle with your pen...' 38 31 (The Night Bakery) 39 32 'High up here, in the northern latitudes...' 40 33 'Water is there to be looked at, not looked into...' 41 34 'Today I have been a good boy...' 42 35 'Even Christ, in his unrecorded years...' 43 Epilogue: William Bates, 1931-2013 45
