The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004

By Harry Clifton

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. '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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780371290

Harry Clifton

Harry Clifton was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2010-13. His books include Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks (Wake Forest University Press, USA, 2007), winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, and five titles from Bloodaxe, among these, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), shortlisted for Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), The Portobello Sonnets (2017) and Herod’s Dispensations (2019). After many years travelling and living Africa, Asia and Europe, he now lives in Dublin.

Book preview

HARRY CLIFTON

THE HOLDING CENTRE

Selected Poems 1974–2004

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 21st century.

‘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

.

‘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 on Secular Eden.

‘The poems begin with something seen, remembered, or 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…poems in this book that will be read as long as any poems are read anywhere… The last poem…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 TÓIBÍN

, The Irish Times 

on The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.

 Cover photograph by Matthew Kenwrick

HARRY CLIFTON

THE HOLDING CENTRE

SELECTED POEMS 1974-2004

TEXTUAL NOTE

This edition includes poems selected from these previous books by Harry Clifton: The Walls of Carthage (1977), The Office of the Salt Merchant (1979), Comparative Lives (1982), and The Liberal Cage (1988), published in Ireland by the Gallery Press; from The Desert Route (1992), published in Ireland by the Gallery Press and in Britain by Bloodaxe Books; from Night Train through the Brenner (1994), published in Ireland by the Gallery Press; and from Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (2007), published in the USA by Wake Forest University Press. It does not include any poems from Harry Clifton’s later collection, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), published in Britain and Ireland by Bloodaxe Books and by Wake Forest University Press in the USA. Detailed acknowledgements for individual poems are given on page 143.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Above the Clouds

1

Blue

Michael Praetorius

The Family Bass

Military Presence, Cobh 1899

Calf Love

North Wall

Blue Room

Middle C

Office of the Salt Merchant

Morning

Metempsychosis

The Walls of Carthage

2

The Desert Route

Latitude 5°N

Loneliness in the Tropics

Plague and Hospice

The Niger Ferry

Government Quarters

Indian Sequence

Monsoon Girl

The Seamstress

Death of Thomas Merton

The Holding Centre

3

Dag Hammarskjöld

Conversations by the Hudson

Euclid Avenue

The Angel

The Waking Hour

Early Christians

Vaucluse

Eccles Street, Bloomsday 1982

4

Exiles

In Earthquake Country

The River

At the Grave of Silone

Taking the Waters

The Poet Sandro Penna, in Old Age

The Better Portion

Firefly

Søren Kierkegaard

Night Train Through the Brenner

The Canto of Ulysses

5

A Spider Dance on Bahnhofstrasse

Attila József’s Trains

MacNeice’s London

Burial with Your People

Worpswede

Friesian Herds

To the Korean Composer Song-On Cho

Trains East, 1991

The Nihilists

The Ice Wager

The Lap of Plenty

6

When the Promised Day Arrives

The Garden

God in France

The Zone

Mort Feldman

A Vision of Hokkaido in the Rain

Cloudberry

A Gulf Stream Ode

After Ireland

The Bird Haunt

The Mystic Marriage

Benjamin Fondane Departs for the East

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Copyright

Above the Clouds

There it is, like breaded snow,

The cloudfield, the deceiving ground

Of existence. Cities, nations

Founder beneath it. Nobody lands.

The plane and its shadow

Fly in tight formation

On a banked white sea

Of immensity. Wedding-flight,

Death-flight, into the eye of the sun,

The muzak-filled ionosphere

Of weightless words, cloud-lexicons,

Hot whiskey and cold beer….

You could rack it up, the balance

Owed to yourself. The price

Of heart failure, burnt-out talent,

Altitude sickness, alcohol highs –

And the music of the spheres

Vibrating in your ears.

1

Blue

One day, you wake

Conscious of blue space

In which a pure sun has been blazing

For hours,