Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994?2004

Harry Clifton

ISBN 10: 1930630360 / ISBN 13: 9781930630369

Published by Wake Forest University Press November 2007, 2007

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 328390

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994?2004
• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press November 2007
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1930630360
• ISBN 13: 9781930630369
• Binding: Paper Back
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.