PORTOBELLO SONNETS - Tapa blanda

Harry Clifton, who divides his life between Ireland and elsewhere, is widely considered a bridge between younger and older Irish poets. This new volume provides further evidence of his pivotal position. Portobello, the district in Dublin where he lives, is a microcosm of a changing, cosmopolitan Ireland. These sonnets, written on his return from sixteen years in continental Europe, are at once a celebration of place, a coming to terms with age, and a rediscovering of the universal in the local.

Harry Clifton was born in 1952 in Dublin, where he was educated at Blackrock College and University College, Dublin. After graduating, Clifton began an extended period of travel outside of Ireland. Many of his experiences from this time had major influence on his poetry because he believes the true home of the poet is “not in a place, but in the language itself.” Beginning in the 1970s, he lectured at a teacher training college in Nigeria. Clifton has also lived in places throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia, even working as an aid administrator in Thailand for Indo-Chinese refugees in the 1980s. He wrote On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abruzzi (1999), a prose work based on a year he spent in Italy’s Abruzzi Mountains. He subsequently lived in Switzerland, England, and Germany before settling in Paris for ten years, a period that he recorded in Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994–2004 (2007). His poems have been translated into several European languages, and he also published a book of stories, Berkeley’s Telephone and Other Fictions (2000). He currently lives in Dublin with his wife, Irish novelist Deirdre Madden. Internationally renowned for his poetry, Harry Clifton was the recipient of fellowships in Germany, France, Australia, and the United States. He was the poet-in-residence at the Frost Place in New Hampshire, an International Fellow at the University of Iowa, and a representative for Ireland at the International Writing Program in Iowa. He has held many teaching positions at universities, including Bremen and Bordeaux in France, and Trinity College and University College, Dublin, in Ireland. In 2008, Clifton received the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the most prestigious poetry prize in Ireland. He also received two Arts Council Bursaries in Literature and the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1981. Harry Clifton served as the fifth Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2010–2013. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish artists’ association.