He lived in Italy's Abruzzi Mountains, Switzerland, England and Germany before settling in Paris for ten years.

His latest titles are The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), and Portobello Sonnets (2017), all published by Bloodaxe Books in Britain and Ireland, and by Wake Forest University Press in the United States.

In his foreword to Harry Clifton's first volume of selected poems, The Desert Route (1992), Derek Mahon wrote: 'The poet has taken the world as his province...

Reviewing Secular Eden (2007) in The Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole wrote of Clifton's work: 'His is a universe of aftermaths, hauntings and returns, in which even God...dreams of becoming flesh again', asserting that his book 'captures an Irish voice that is utterly contemporary in its restless movement through time and space'.

The last poem, "Oweniny, Upper Reaches", filled with soft, haunting cadences and strange, ambiguous musings on solitude, memory and the meaning of things, is a masterpiece.

Williams wrote: 'There is so much history in Harry Clifton's poems, so much geography, landscape, cityscape, repeopled precincts of the imagination, so much human drama and comedy; so many people, mythic, unlikely and hauntingly real.