The holding centre

This selection presents for the first time the thirty year trajectory of an acclaimed Irish poet who has lived and worked between the secular and the religious, Eros and history, Ireland and elsewhere, be it west Africa after civil war, south-east Asia after the Khmer Rouge or Europe at the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and whose extraordinary body of work has re-defined what it means to be Irish in the twenty-first century. Harry Clifton has published six other books of poetry, most recently 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.