Portobello, the district in Dublin where the Irish poet Harry Clifton lives, is a microcosm of a changing, cosmopolitan Ireland. These sonnets, written on his return from sixteen years in continental Europe, are at once a celebration of place, a coming to terms with age and a rediscovering of the universal in the local. Harry Clifton has published seven other books of poetry, most recently The Holding Centre: Selected Poems [tel] and The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass [tel] from Bloodaxe, and Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks [tel], winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, from Wake Forest University Press in the US. His other books include On the Spine of Italy [tel], his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, and Berkeley's Telephone [tel], a collection of short fiction.