For half a century of ever-broadening vision, award-winning poet Harry Clifton has addressed what the Irish Times calls ‘his large concerns and his angular relationship to Ireland, one that produces extraordinary verbal and emotional effects’. His latest book is a quest, through origin and migration, South America to the North of Ireland, Khao I Dang refugee camp to Glasnevin graveyard, for a lost maternal ground. Harry Clifton has published ten other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), Portobello Sonnets (2017) and Herod’s Dispensations (2019).

"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." - The Irish Times, on The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass

"What I love about Harry's work is that he's an outsider... Much like Joyce, he's one of these people who writes about Ireland with the great insight that only a sense of self-exile can bring. With this new collection, Herod's Dispensations, he's talking about a creative rebirth brought on by a trip to China, but he's also talking about the ageing process and about coming back to Dublin to settle." - RTE Radio 1's Arena (Irish Poetry books of 2019), on Herod's Dispensations