Please join us for a conversation on the emerging future in Europe with Irish poet Harry Clifton. The event takes place as part of our ongoing European Voices series, focussed around issues at the intersection of politics and culture. The conversation with Harry Clifton will encompass questions of language, culture, nation, history, and the role of the poet in society.
Harry Clifton was born in Dublin and attended Blackrock College and University College, Dublin. His collection of poems, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (2007), won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award in 2008. Clifton is the author of the poetry pamphlet Null Beauty (1976) and the books The Walls of Carthage (1977), Office of the Salt Merchant (1979), The Liberal Cage (1988), and The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973–1988 (1992). Clifton was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2010 to 2013.
Fintan O’Toole wrote of Clifton’s work in the Irish Times: “His is a universe of aftermaths, hauntings and returns, in which even God . . . dreams of becoming flesh again,” and asserted that Secular Eden “captures an Irish voice that is utterly contemporary in its restless movement through time and space.”
Introduction by poet and translator Alissa Valles. Moderated by Meg Tyler, Associate Professor of Humanities at Boston University. This year's European Voices events are organized in collaboration with the literary journal AGNI and the Goethe-Institut Boston and are taking place as part of EU Futures, a series of conversations exploring the emerging future in Europe. The EU Futures project is supported by a Getting to Know Europe Grant from the European Commission Delegation in Washington, DC to the Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University.