Publisher's Synopsis
This early selected edition of Harry Clifton's poems was copublished with The Gallery Press in Ireland, with a foreword by Derek Mahon. It brought together work from his first four collections: The Walls of Carthage (1977), Office of the Salt Merchant (1979), Comparative Lives (1982) and The Liberal Cage (1988). The book's desert route is as much metaphysical as physical, and it begins and ends in Ireland. As Harry Clifton says: 'It tries to organise fifteen years of travel and experience into an approximate arc... There is always, too, the umblicus back to Ireland.'.
