Herod's Dispensations

Herod's Dispensations

by HarryClifton (Author)

Synopsis

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.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published: 28 Mar 2019

ISBN 10: 1780374518
ISBN 13: 9781780374512

Media Reviews
'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 Toibin, 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.
Author Bio
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.