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, ... Read moreor 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.
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