Abstract

This essay reads Harry Clifton’s poetry as a body of work that illustrates the poet’s engagement with and detachment from the poetry of his peers. It notes Clifton’s chosen routes of travel in Africa, Asia, and Europe, his interest in Ireland and its elsewheres and his endeavours to find an ideal distance to write from. It also elucidates his Irish subject matter, his involvement with journals, editors and publishers as well as his critical readings of 20th-century Irish poetry. The essay engages with important strands of current critical thinking that have sought to examine a post-nationalist Ireland with Clifton being seen as a bridge between an older and younger circle of writers. Neither hermetic nor sociable, Clifton emerges as a poet engaging with concentric circles of Irish poetry on his own terms.

Highlights

  • This essay reads Harry Clifton’s poetry as a body of work that illustrates the poet’s engagement with and detachment from the poetry of his peers

  • The poet takes stock of his relations with his contemporaries in Dublin while reflecting on recent experiences in Asia finding himself alienated from the dysfunctional city he has returned to. This was the year of the GUBU bother when, in the summer of 1982, Irish society and politics veered in the direction of the grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented (GUBU)

  • This phrase was memorably articulated Taoiseach Charles Haughey in his improvised response at a press conference to a bizarre set of circumstances by which a wanted murderer was found staying in the house of the Attorney General, Patrick Connolly, in a case that would be famously fictionalised later by John Banville in The Book of Evidence (1989)

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Summary

Into the Live Register

In August 1982, suspected murderer Malcolm MacArthur (who was subsequently convicted of the murder of Bridie Gargan in Phoenix Park on 22 July 1982) was apprehended at the house of Attorney General Patrick Connolly. Taoiseach Charles Haughey described this turn of events as ‘a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance’ and this phrase was condensed by Conor Cruise O’Brien, as ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’ (GUBU) which became shorthand for this and other high-level political scandals in Ireland as well as denoting an era of dysfunctional Irish politics in the early 1980s

My estate
To the Gold and Ivory Coasts
To the unlit aerodrome
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