The poems in Secular Eden, drawn as they are from notebooks kept over a decade in Paris, are at once the lyrical diary of an Irish poet at a key moment in the life of Europe, and a meditation on sex and marriage, exile and history, the bright and dark of human happiness in a secular age. Harry Clifton’s first book in thirteen years, since Night Train Through the Brenner in 1994, is by far his most ample, achieved and complete statement yet. Winner of the 2008 Irish Times Poetry Now Award.