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NEWS, Recent Reviews, and more...
from Wake Forest U Press
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*Secular Eden by Harry Clifton
WINNER of the 2008 Irish Times Poetry Now Award
Reviews are streaming in for Clifton's volume:
“He is home now, one of the most respected Irish poets ... and evidently absorbed in the perennially fruitful themes of 'exile' and return. ... Seriousness and drollery, adventure and achievement, are all here. He's already gone much of the way, and looks set to 'go the distance'. Secular Eden should win his work the attention it deserves.” --Derek Mahon, TLS (London) Times Literary Supplement |
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“His dazzlingly accomplished book is arguably the first great work of Irish poetic post-modernism. ... A major writer is one who has escaped the anxiety of influence. Few achive this by being completely original, and poets in particular are in a constant dialogue with the past. But Clifton achieves it in a paradoxically original way, by capturing with masterful fluency the sense of a world in which everything has happened before and been written before. His is a universe of aftermaths, hauntings and returns, in which even God (in the delightful poem God in France) dreams of becoming flesh again, as he did once before.” --Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times
"Secular Eden is full of figures in transit--freedom fighters in the forests and fields, travellers and refugees, even the lovers in the breathtakingly beautiful title poem--because transit is the very stuff of history: nothing in the world is constant, other than change, and Clifton gives himself over to this Heraclitean flux in poems that are both well-crafted and spontaneous, necessarily doomed attempts to capture the fleeting show.” --John Burnside, Irish Times
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*Conor O'Callaghan has received the annual The Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry Magazine for three poems in Poetry's Summer 2007 issue. This important prize celebrates the best work printed in Poetry during the preceding year. Previous recent winners include Robert Pinsky, Robert Bly, Paul Muldoon, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.
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The National Endowment for the Arts has chosen WFUP as the American publisher for the upcoming volume of Northern Irish poetry, entitled The New North, edited by Chris Agee. |
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*The Poetry Book Society (U.K.) has chosen Ciaran Carson's upcoming volume, For All We Know, as the Spring 2008 Book Selection. Founded by T.S. Eliot in 1953, the Poetry Book Society (PBS) is an organization devoted to developing and maintaining a readership for poetry in the U.K. The PBS awards the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards.
And... “Through,” a poem from For All We Know, is featured in the Janary 28, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.
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