‘From the Land before Birth’: Harry Clifton’s <i>Gone Self Storm</i>

Harry Clifton’s family connection to Chile on his mother’s side is well known, not least through poems like ‘A Gulf Stream Ode’ from his award-winning collection Secular Eden (2007) and ‘The Rain Shadow’ and ‘Mother Tongue’ from The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012). However, in Gone Self Storm (2023), Clifton searches more extensively for what he has called his ‘lost origins’. This essay seeks to interpret that ante-natal quest and elucidates Clifton’s geographical imagination in drawing together Latin America and Ireland in a ‘Gulf Stream of energy, tragic knowledge’. The elegies for his mother are read in terms of the parched emotional climate of mid-century Ireland alongside the ‘waterless deserts’ of northern Chile. The essay further explores the valedictory timbre of Clifton’s latest poems suggesting that the Keatsian motif of ‘gone self storms’ is part of Clifton’s endeavour to distil the essence of his and his contemporaries’ lives.