He was born in Dublin, but has lived in Africa and Asia, as well as more recently in continental Europe. He has published five collections of poems in Ireland and the United Kingdom, including The Liberal Cage and The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973–1988. Wake Forest University Press, Clifton's publisher in North America, published his newest volume, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004, in 2007, which won the 2008 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His poems have been translated into several European languages, and Le Canto d'Ulysse, his selected poems in French, was published in 1996. Among many awards, he has received the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award ... more on Wikipedia