Wake Forest University Press poet wins top award
Clifton honored for his latest collection
Harry Clifton, a Dublin-born poet published by Wake Forest University Press, has won this year's Irish Times Poetry Now award for his collection, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004.
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Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 is Clifton's first full collection since 1994. His previous collections include The Liberal Cage, The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973-1988 and Night Train Through the Brenner. He has also published an account of a year spent in the Abruzzo mountains, On the Spine of Italy, and a collection of short stories, Berkeley's Telephone and Other Stories.
In selecting Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004, the judges described the collection as "the achievement of several years' work... with great profundity to the poems in how they explored ideas... and a real sense of vocation in the collection."
Clifton, who teaches at University College Dublin, received the award at the DLR Poetry Now International Poetry Festival in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, earlier this month. This is the fourth year the award has been given. Previous winners were Seamus Heaney for District and Circle, Derek Mahon for Harbour Lights and Dorothy Molloy, who won the inaugural prize for her posthumously published collection, Hare Soup.
Wake Forest University Press publishes exclusively Irish poetry.
