The Holding Centre: Selected Poems

This selection presents for the first time the thirty-year trajectory of an acclaimed Irish poet who has lived and worked between the secular and the religious, Eros and history, Ireland and elsewhere, be it West Africa after civil war, Southeast Asia after the Khmer Rouge, or Europe at the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Clifton’s extraordinary body of work has redefined what it means to be Irish in the twenty-first century. Included in this selection are poems from Clifton’s earlier books as well as new, unpublished work.