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    Herod's Dispensations
    Herod's Dispensations
    Herod's Dispensations
    Ebook65 pages24 minutes

    Herod's Dispensations

    By Harry Clifton

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    About this ebook

    From the first estates of Dublin to the karmic wastes of northern China, this new volume by the eminent Irish poet Harry Clifton charts a course through the spiritual orphanhood, the loss and protection of innocence that define our new nomadic age. The poet has moved beyond middle age to revisit, in meditations on death and migration, the territories of the Far East from his early years, in a journey that parallels the geographical movements of the volume as a whole. These awe-inspiring poems capture the epochal nature of Herod's Dispensations in both their modern and ancient permutations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWake Forest University Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2019
    ISBN9781943666256
    Herod's Dispensations
    Author

    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.

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      Book preview

      Herod's Dispensations - Harry Clifton

      appeared.

      TO THE NEXT GENERATION

      These days, like the leech-gatherer

      In Wordsworth, I keep the wolf from the door

      Of indigence, and take the weather

      On the lonely moor.

      The gibbet creaks in the wind. The body is gone.

      Here comes a soldier, home from the war.

      Napoleon, he tells me, is no more,

      The work of healing is done

      And the million sutures closed, below on the plain

      Where the bloods are drawn.

      I ask myself private questions now, in the dawn,

      About women and poems, the impossibilities

      Of old age, dipping for pondlife in the rain

      As a child looks up to me.

      REDESDALE ESTATE, 1956

      for Catriona Crowe

      First, this old clock. As I dismantle it,

      A child of indeterminate age

      On the garage floor, the cogs and flywheels

      Buzz, the hour-hands race and stop,

      Go back on themselves,

      And I peer, like a little god,

      In the workings of time. Steady,

      The ticking starts, suburban days

      Falling into place

      Like memory. Glass front doors

      And front room windows

      Are black depths, to be looked into

      Afterwards, when the time is right.

      But for now, each pebbledashed house

      Is a Freudian box of tricks,

      Pre-conscious, locked in itself,

      Respectable, safe, like Nineteen Fifty Six.

      Pounds and ounces, pennyweights and grams—

      A grocer’s measuring instruments

      Sift reality, slicing ham

      And butter, trowelling sugar in brown paper bags

      For all of us blow-ins, on whom the hag

      Has roosted, the hag of Ireland,

      Stateless… Lord Redesdale,

      Whoever you were, you gave us the myth of a State,

      You left us your name

      To conjure with, on your sold estate,

      And fled to England, clutching the deeds.

      De Valera set us down here, and bade us breed.

      A new generation. A clean slate

      For history to write on. Non-attachment

      Our middle name. Sleepless, we hear

      The cattle-drive, to the milking-sheds

      Of Stillorgan, in the early hours,

      Like the lost morning of a mythic race

      Our fathers snore through. De Valera,

      Give us our

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