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).