Spiritual orphanhood, the loss and protection of innocence — from the first estates of Dublin to the karmic wastes of northern China — lie at the heart of this new collection by the eminent Irish poet Harry Clifton. Herod’s Dispensations shows his work now reaching beyond middle age, to revisit — in meditations on death and migration — the territories of the Far East from his early years, in the light of a new nomadic age. Harry Clifton has published nine other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974–2004 (2014) and Portobello Sonnets (2017).
