Secular Eden

$15.95 – $21.95

The poems in Secular Eden, drawn as they are from notebooks kept over a decade in Paris, are at once the lyrical diary of an Irish poet at a key moment in the life of Europe, and a meditation on sex and marriage, exile and history, the bright and dark of human happiness in a secular age. Harry Clifton’s first book in thirteen years, since Night Train Through the Brenner in 1994, is by far his most ample, achieved and complete statement yet.

Winner of the 2008 Irish Times Poetry Now Award

Praise for Secular Eden:

“In poetry, Harry Clifton’s Secular Eden makes it clear he is one of the best Irish poets working now.”
– Colm Tóibín, The Irish Times

‘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 achievement of several years’ work . . . with great profundity to the poems in how they explore ideas . . . and a real sense of vocation in the collection.”
–Judges’ citation for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award

“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, The Irish Times