'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 poems begin with something seen, remembered, ... Read moreor 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... there are a number of poems in this book that will be read as long as any poems are read anywhere... The last poem, Oweniny, Upper Reaches , filled with soft, haunting cadences and strange, ambiguous musings on solitude, memory and the meaning of things, 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 Toibin, Irish Times on The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.; `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, Irish Times on Secular Eden. Show Less