CANR
WORK TITLE:
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
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CITY: Belfast
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Irish
LAST VOLUME: CANR 189
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October 9, 1948, in Belfast, Northern Ireland; died of lung cancer, October 6, 2019; son of Liam and Mary Carson; married Deirdre Shannon, 1982; children: two sons, one daughter.
EDUCATION:Queen’s University, Belfast, B.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked as a schoolteacher in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1974-75; also worked as a civil servant and musician. Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast, Northern Ireland, traditional arts officer, 1975-92, literature officer, 1992-98; Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, professor and center director, 1998-2016.
AVOCATIONS:Playing the Irish flute.
AWARDS:Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, 1987, for The Irish for No; Irish Times Irish Literature Prize, 1990, for Poetry Belfast Confetti; T.S. Eliot Prize, 1993, for First Language; Booker Prize nomination, 2001, for Shamrock Tea; Eric Gregory award; Alice Hunt Bartlett award; Irish Times/Aer Lingus award; Forward Prize for Poetry from Great Britain’s Forward Arts Foundation, 2003, for Breaking News; Cholmondeley Award, 2003; Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, for The Inferno of Dante Alighieri: A New Translation; Forward Poetry Prize, 2008, for For All We Know.
RELIGION: “Raised Catholic.”WRITINGS
Poems and essays included in anthologies, including The Shack: Irish Poets in the Foothills and Mountains of the Blue Ridge, Wake Forest University, 2015.
SIDELIGHTS
A poet and storyteller from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ciaran Carson was a gifted teller of tales who won a T.S. Elliot award for his poetry and was nominated for the Booker Prize. Carson died of lung cancer in 2019, leaving behind a final collection of poems, Still Life, which he wrote after having been given a terminal diagnosis. Writing in the London Guardian online, Patricia Craig noted that Carson was born in and grew up in Belfast. Craig commented: “He went on to transfigure his native city, and transfix his readers, with a rich accumulation of poems, metafictions and other unclassifiable prose works.” Craig added: “Carson had Belfast lore and topography at his fingertips, but he superimposed a psychic overlay on the city’s mundane streets and terraces, its feuds and factions, the aggravations and atrocities of the bloody 30-year Troubles.” Writing in the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger similarly remarked that Carson’s poetry and prose “captured the pungency, tensions and rich heritage of Northern Ireland, especially his native Belfast.” Genzlinger further commented: “Mr. Carson — who was also a translator, working in several languages — viewed writing poetry not as an exercise in setting down an idea, but as an exploration.”
Carson inherited his love of storytelling from his father, Liam, who would tell his children stories in Gaelic. “As far back as I remember, the age of two or three I think,” Carson said on the Radio Netherlands website, “every evening, my father would sit us down and say, ‘Now, here’s a story for you.’ And the story would appear to go on night after night for weeks. Whether in fact he did tell us stories each night, for weeks and months and years on end, I’m not sure, but in my imagination it was that way.”
Carson’s poems, essays, and fiction are all infused with a distinctive, Irish style of tale telling. A common motif is his native Belfast, which is a living landscape to the author, scarred and worn by its violent recent history, yet alive with its people, culture, and history.
Carson’s poetry reflects the pain that natives of Belfast stubbornly endure. “Reading Carson’s poetry is a vicarious experience,” commented William Pratt in a World Literature Today review of Selected Poems, “a bloodbath that is bloodless but thoroughly convincing, and for such a testimony to human endurance one has to be grateful despite the misery.” In Essays in Criticism, John Kerrigan compared and contrasted Carson with fellow poet Seamus Heaney, noting: “Carson writes with Proustian intensity about the elusiveness of memory in poems which thickly describe the fashions, songs, and smells of vanished Belfast.” Kerrigan also noted the poet’s fascination with cartography in his imagery about Belfast. Drawing a parallel between Carson and other Irish poets, the critic explained that “Carson is interested in the dubiety of maps which seem authoritative: no more permanent than place, they keep changing along with the city, and shape perceptions of the territory through censorship and velleity.”
The sense of the transitoriness and mutability of Belfast, as in his poetry, is seen in Carson’s autobiographical novel The Star Factory, in which he recaptures images of his youth before the time of terrorism between the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland began. Compared by some critics to James Joyce’s writing about Dublin and Seamus Heaney’s memories of Ulster, The Star Factory reconstructs the poet’s childhood memories in what New Statesman contributor Terry Eagleton called a “wonderfully evocative book” in which Carson “ransack[s] his Belfast boyhood for gleaming, sensuous treasures.”
In the book, the poet reflects on subjects ranging from school and his father to his boyhood friends and remembered objects. There is no real plot, and the book is not faithful autobiography, as it is tinged with Carson’s artful eye. However, “Carson does not seek to fictionalise his history,” wrote Sunday Times contributor Walter Ellis. “Instead, he allows his finely honed mind to wander, unfettered, through the labyrinths of memory.” Ellis also wrote: “The funny thing is that The Star Factory is a splendid, easy read, packed, however obliquely, with wonderful reminiscences of old Belfast, a city much maligned.”
In addition to capturing the past in The Star Factory, Carson also captures the musical essence of Ireland in Last Night’s Fun: A Book about Irish Traditional Music, which was published in the United States as Last Night’s Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music. Less direct than his earlier The Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music, which is more an encyclopedia on the subject, Last Night’s Fun seeks to convey the feeling of Irish music through thoughtful essays and poetry. Carson, a musician himself who plays the flute, touches not only on music, however, but also on such subjects as Irish cooking, homemade whiskey, the Gaelic language, history, and other subjects that one might hear spoken about while in an Irish pub. As one Publishers Weekly contributor described the book: “It is an endless pub crawl in the labyrinthine soul of a remarkable writer who dares to play unfamiliar tunes.” Alix Madrigal, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, called it an “impressionistic meditation on Irish traditional music.” Madrigal continued: “Carson is full of asides and digressions, funny and learned both,” concluding that the book “is a joy to read.”
Carson’s works of fiction are similarly quirky pieces. Fishing for Amber: A Long Story, for example, is unconventional and difficult to categorize. “I hesitate to call it a novel … it is a leitmotif,” wrote Erica Wagner for the Times. Divided into twenty-six chapters that are connected by several literary devices, the narratives are told by Jack the Lad, who is, in turn, telling stories from Irish mythology to a fairy audience; they are, furthermore, tales that were originally told to him by his father. “Another loose connection comes from the narrator’s father’s fascination with Holland, and his correspondence—in Esperanto—with a Dutchman,” noted Wagner. This part of the book comes right out of Carson’s own life; his father had a similar correspondence with a Dutchman whom the family called Uncle Are. Carson uses this device to write about such related subjects as Dutch art and science, but he also touches on such diverse topics as stamp collecting and microscopes, among other seemingly unrelated things. “This is a strange work,” Wagner wrote, “multifaceted, not entirely satisfying. But it is consistently intriguing, consistently original.”
The troubles in Northern Island come to the center of Carson’s fiction in his Shamrock Tea, another odd tale involving a magical tea that allows its main character, Carson, and his cousin Berenice to enter the painting “The Arnolfini Wedding” by Jan van Eyck, where they meet interesting people from history and have various adventures. But there is a serious side to the tale, for the fictional Carson has been sent into the painting by his Uncle Celestine, who wants his nephew to locate more shamrock tea, which is concealed in the painting. The tea has the quality of allowing those who use it to see the world more clearly and understand the oneness of all people. Carson’s uncle plans to pour the tea into Belfast’s drinking water, thus putting an end to the Protestant-Catholic fighting.
This strange tale is a challenging but potentially rewarding read, according to critics. Nancy Pearl called it “maddening, entrancing, and mysterious” in a Booklist review, while a Publishers Weekly contributor warned that “because the disparate tales do not coalesce until late in this work, readers may lose patience, especially as the characters are ‘allowed no inner thoughts.’” However, Ian Sansom, writing in the Guardian, commented that Shamrock Tea is “perhaps [Carson’s] most potent blend to date.”
Carson received the Forward Prize for Poetry from Great Britain’s Forward Arts Foundation for Breaking News, a collection of his poems published in 2003. Noting that the collection “is devoted to war and its poetic representation,” Antioch Review contributor John Taylor wrote that the author “brings the forgotten plight of Belfast to the public forefront once again.”
Carson’s 2008 collection of poems, For All We Know, was called “a remarkable sequence of seventy inter-connected poems” by Tower Poetry Web site contributor Anna Lewis. The poems are narrated by Gabriel, an Irish man who reminisces about a woman named Nina. Gabriel’s recollections, however, are not presented in chronological order as the Irishman’s memory skips back and forth to events in the couples’ life together.
Nevertheless, Lewis wrote for the Tower Poetry website that “the full impact of the sequence only comes across when it is read in order,” noting: “As each poem adds a little more detail to the couple’s story, the reader gradually discovers two young people who are each rather on the edge of the story they share.” Alan Brownjohn, writing for the Times, commented: “Its ‘plot’ needs to be constructed piecemeal by readers who are willing to make frequent references back and ahead.” Brownjohn went on to write in the same review: “But almost every one of Carson’s puzzle pieces is an incentive to make the effort and a well-shaped poem in its own right.”
Gabriel and Nina meet in the 1970s during the Irish Troubles. Commenting on Gabriel’s and Nina’s story as it takes them to different parts of the world, Jason B. Jones wrote for the Bookslut Web site: “Some of these details are slightly wobbly—Nina is also the name of a perfume designer, and there are cloak-and-dagger poems of false identities, of betrayals and assignations, and, sometimes, the pair are cast into a world of fairy-tale.”
As Gabriel retells certain stories, key aspects sometimes change, reflecting a major theme concerning memory. Carson writes in one poem titled “The Shadow”: “You know how you know when someone’s telling lies? you said. They / get their story right every time, down to the last word. / Whereas when they tell the truth it’s never the same twice. They / reformulate.”
In the last poem in the book, “Zugzwang,” readers learn that Nina has died. Writing in the Guardian, Charles Bainbridge commented that this poem “movingly brings together the process of the entire sequence, touching on motifs and patterns that have been repeated throughout: the obsession with language, the imagery of clothes and quilts, the fragments of a French folksong and the complex structures of the fugue.” Writing for the Irish Literary Supplement, Helen Emmitt commented: “ For All We Know is a tour de force. It is one of those volumes that rewards both those who enjoy wrestling with the fragmented narrative and those who wish simply to revel in Carson’s gorgeous lines.”
Carson is also a noted translator of works. He received the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Inferno of Dante Alighieri: A New Translation. A contributor to Contemporary Review commented that the author “has created a compelling English version of Dante’s poem.”
Carson also served as translator for The Táin, an epic Irish tale also known as “The Cattle Raid of Cooley.” Catherine English, writing for Booklist, referred to The Táin as a “landmark translation” and “a fresh, modern retelling.”
Carson went on to publish a number more poetry collections, including his 2009 Collected Poems, as well as On the Night Watch; Until Before After; Exchange Place; From Elsewhere; and From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations. Many of the poems in these collections move away from Carson’s earlier focus on Belfast and the Troubles.
In the spring of 2019, Carson was given a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. “If anything, death focused Carson,” noted New Yorker contributor Kevin Young, “bringing a burst of poems that seemed to know that they were his last—and, also, knew how to last.” Young added: “Carson’s case, this lastness was literal—given a short time to live he emerged with poems reconsidering art and life, determined but not deterministic, not falsely hopeful but fully in the moment.” The final poems appeared in the 2020 collection, Still Life, verses dealing with art, his daily walks with his wife, ruminations on life and death.
Writing in the Irish Times, Gail McConnell had high praise for Still Life, noting: “A book of cherished things; of intimacies; of marvels; and these in the sight of death. The courage of all this, and the tenderness and joy in its pages, is almost impossible to fathom. Miraculous, ordinary, tender, true.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Contemporary Poets, 6th edition, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1996.
Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002.
Grzegorz Czemiel, Limits of Orality and Textuality in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry, Peter Lang Edition (New York, NY), 2014.
PERIODICALS
Antioch Review, spring, 2004, John Taylor, review of Breaking News, p. 371.
Booklist, March 1, 1997, Patricia Monaghan, review of Last Night’s Fun: A Book about Irish Traditional Music, p. 1102; September 1, 1998, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of The Star Factory, p. 56; December 1, 2001, Nancy Pearl, review of Shamrock Tea, p. 627; January 1, 2003, Ray Olson, review of The Inferno of Dante Alighieri: A New Translation, p. 836; December 15, 2007, Catherine English, review of The Táin, p. 16.
Contemporary Review, April, 2003, review of The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, p. 252.
Daily Telegraph (London, England), A.N. Wilson, “Positive Memories of a Wickedly Negative Poet.”
Essays in Criticism, April, 1998, John Kerrigan, “Each Writing: Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson,” p. 144.
Guardian (London, England), February 12, 2000, Robert Potts, review of The Twelfth of Never, p. 10; April 14, 2001, Ian Sansom, “Magic Potions: What’s in the Tea, Asks Ian Sansom: Shamrock Tea by Ciaran Carson,” p. 9; October 27, 2007, Peter McDonald, “Courage’s Brutal Core,” review of The Táin; June 21 2008, Charles Bainbridge, “In a Pane of Moonlight,” review of For All We Know.
Independent (London, England), October 28, 2007, Murrough O’Brien, review of The Táin.
Irish Literary Supplement, fall, 2008, Helen Emmitt, “Ciaran Carson’s Art of the Fugue,” review of For All We Know, p. 21.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2007, review of The Táin.
Library Journal, February 15, 1997, Lloyd Jansen, review of Last Night’s Fun, p. 136; July 1, 2008, Fred Muratori, review of For All We Know, p. 83.
New Statesman, May 31, 1996, Patricia Craig, review of Last Night’s Fun, p. 37; December 12, 1997, Terry Eagleton, review of The Star Factory, p. 45; July 29, 2002, Lavinia Greenlaw, “Going Underground,” review of The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, p. 36.
Publishers Weekly, January 27, 1997, review of Last Night’s Fun, p. 88; August 17, 1998, review of The Star Factory, p. 57; October 29, 2001, review of Shamrock Tea, p. 35; November 12, 2007, review of The Táin, p. 35; April 21, 2008, review of For All We Know, p. 37.
San Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 1997, Alix Madrigal, “Sparkling Riffs on Irish Music and Carousing,” p. 4; January 13, 2002, Kenneth Baker, “Ciaran Carson’s Head Trip between Belfast and Bruges: Novel Mixes the Search for Peace with a Quest for Ireland’s LSD,” p. M3.
Spectator, March 31, 2001, David Carr-Gomm, review of Shamrock Tea, p. 43.
Sunday Times (London, England), November 23, 1997, Walter Ellis, “Boyhood Troubles: Ireland,” p. 7.
Times (London, England), November 20, 1997, Sebastian Barry, “Taking a Byte at Belfast,” p. 41; November 18, 1999, Erica Wagner, “Between the Teller and the Tale,” p. 47; April 4, 2001, Anthea Lawson, review of Shamrock Tea, p. 14; April 20, 2008, Alan Brownjohn, review of For All We Know.
World Literature Today, autumn, 1999, review of The Star Factory, p. 749; summer- autumn, 2001, William Pratt, review of Selected Poems, p. 152.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/ (November 15, 2019), “Ciaran Carson.”
Asymptote, https://www.asymptotejournal.com/ (May 28, 2015), Farisa Khalid, review of From Elsewhere.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (October 10, 2008), Jason B. Jones, review of For All We Know.
British Council, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/ (November 15, 2019), “Ciaran Carson.”
Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (January 5, 2019), Martina Evans, review of From There to Here; (October 17, 2019), Gail McConnell, “Ciaran Carson’s Still Life: Courage and Joy, Miraculous, Ordinary, Tender and True,” review of Still Life.
New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/ (October 8, 2019), Kevin Young, “Ciaran Carson’s Urgent, Hopeful, Final Lines.”
Poetry Archive, http://www.poetryarchive.org/ (October 10, 2008), profile of author.
Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (November 15, 2019), “Ciaran Carson.”
Radio Netherlands, http://www.rnw.nl/ (April 6, 2002), interview with author.
Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University Belfast, http://www.qub.ac.uk/ schools/SeamusHeaneyCentreforPoetry/ (October 10, 2008), faculty profile of author.
Tower Poetry, http://www.towerpoetry.org.uk/ (October 10, 2008), Anna Lewis, review of For All We Know.
OBITUARIES
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (October 9, 2019), Neil Genzlinger, “Ciaran Carson, Versatile Belfast Poet, Is Dead at 70.”
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (October 6, 2019), Patricia Craig, “Ciaran Carson Obituary.”
Ciaran Carson
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Ciaran Carson
Born
9 October 1948
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Died
6 October 2019 (aged 70)
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Education
St. Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School, Belfast
Queen's University, Belfast
Notable awards
Eric Gregory Award (1978)
Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (1987)
T. S. Eliot Prize (1993)
Cholmondeley Award (2003)
Forward Poetry Prize (2003)
Ciaran Gerard Carson (9 October 1948 – 6 October 2019) was a Northern Ireland-born poet and novelist.
Contents
1
Biography
2
Work
3
Critical perspective
4
Bibliography
4.1
Poetry
4.2
Prose
4.3
Translations
5
Prizes and awards
6
References
7
External links
Biography[edit]
Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast into an Irish-speaking family. His father, William, was a postman and his mother, Mary, worked in the linen mills. He spent his early years in the lower Falls Road where he attended Slate Street School and then St. Gall's Primary School, both of which subsequently closed. He then attended St. Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School before proceeding to Queen's University, Belfast (QUB) to read for a degree in English.[1]
After graduation, he worked for over twenty years as the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 1998 he was appointed a Professor of English at QUB where he established, and was the Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.[2] He retired in 2016 but remained attached to the organisation on a part-time basis.[3] He resided in Belfast.
He died of lung cancer on 6 October 2019 at the age of 70.[4][5]
Work[edit]
His collections of poetry include The Irish for No (1987), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize; Belfast Confetti (1990), which won the Irish Times' Irish Literature Prize for Poetry; and First Language: Poems (1993), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. His prose includes The Star Factory (1997) and Fishing for Amber (1999). His novel Shamrock Tea (2001), explores themes present in Jan van Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Marriage. His translation of Dante's Inferno was published in November 2002. Breaking News, (2003), won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and a Cholmondeley Award.[2] His translation of Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court came out in 2006. For All We Know was published in 2008, and his Collected Poems were published in Ireland in 2008, and in North America in 2009.[citation needed]
He was also an accomplished musician, and the author of Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music (1996), a study of Irish traditional music.[2] He wrote a bi-monthly column on traditional Irish music for The Journal of Music. In 2007 his translation of the early Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, called The Táin, was published by Penguin Classics.[citation needed]
Critical perspective[edit]
Carson managed an unusual marriage in his work between the Irish vernacular story-telling tradition and the witty elusive mock-pedantic scholarship of Paul Muldoon.[2] (Muldoon also combines both modes). In a trivial sense, what differentiates them is line length. As Carol Rumens pointed out 'Before the 1987 publication of The Irish for No, Carson was a quiet, solid worker in the groves of Heaney. But at that point he rebelled into language, set free by a rangy "long line" that was attributed variously to the influence of C. K. Williams, Louis MacNeice and traditional music'.
Carson's first book was The New Estate (1976).[6] In the ten years before The Irish for No (1987) he perfected a new style which effected a unique fusion of traditional story telling with postmodernist devices. The first poem in The Irish for No, the tour-de-force 'Dresden' parades his new technique. Free ranging allusion is the key. The poem begins in shabby bucolic:
'And as you entered in, a bell would tinkle in the empty shop, a musk
Of soap and turf and sweets would hit you from the gloom.'
It takes five pages to get to Dresden, the protagonist having joined the RAF as an escape from rural and then urban poverty. In Carson everything is rooted in the everyday, so the destruction of Dresden evokes memories of a particular Dresden shepherdess he had on the mantelpiece as a child and the destruction is described in terms of 'an avalanche of porcelain, sluicing and cascading'.
Like Muldoon's, Carson's work was intensely allusive. In much of his poetry he had a project of sociological scope: to evoke Belfast in encyclopaedic detail. Part Two of The Irish for No was called 'Belfast Confetti' and this idea expanded to become his next book. The Belfast of the Troubles is mapped with obsessive precision and the language of the Troubles is as powerful a presence as the Troubles themselves. The poem "Belfast Confetti" signals this:
'Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks,
Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type...'
In First Language (1993), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize, language has become the subject. There are translations of Ovid, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Carson was deeply influenced by Louis MacNeice and he included a poem called 'Bagpipe Music'. What it owes to the original is its rhythmic verve. With his love of dense long lines it is not surprising he was drawn to classical poetry and Baudelaire. In fact, the rhythm of 'Bagpipe Music' seems to be that of an Irish jig, on which subject he was an expert (his book about Irish music Last Night's Fun (1996) is regarded as a classic). To be precise, the rhythm is that of a "single jig" or "slide."):
'blah dithery dump a doodle scattery idle fortunoodle.'
Carson then entered a prolific phase in which the concern for language liberated him into a new creativity. Opera Etcetera (1996) had a set of poems on letters of the alphabet and another series on Latin tags such as 'Solvitur Ambulando' and 'Quod Erat Demonstrandum' and another series of translations form the Romanian poet Stefan Augustin Doinas. Translation became a key concern, The Alexandrine Plan (1998) featured sonnets by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé rendered into alexandrines. Carson's penchant for the long line found a perfect focus in the 12-syllable alexandrine line. He also published The Twelfth of Never (1999), sonnets on fanciful themes:
'This is the land of the green rose and the lion lily, /
Ruled by Zeno's eternal tortoises and hares, /
where everything is metaphor and simile'.
The Ballad of HMS Belfast (1999) collected his Belfast poems.
Bibliography[edit]
Poetry[edit]
1976: The New Estate, Blackstaff Press, Wake Forest University Press
1987: The Irish for No, Gallery Press, Wake Forest University Press
1988: The New Estate and Other Poems, Gallery Press
1989: Belfast Confetti, Gallery Press, Wake Forest University Press
1993: First Language: Poems, Gallery Books, Wake Forest University Press
1996: Opera Et Cetera, Bloodaxe, Wake Forest University Press
1998: The Alexandrine Plan, (adaptations of sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud); Gallery :Press, Wake Forest University Press
1999: The Ballad of HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems, Picador
2001: The Twelfth of Never, Picador, Wake Forest University Press
2002: The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (translator), Granta, awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize
2003: Breaking News, Gallery Press, Wake Forest University Press, awarded the 2003 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection
2008: For All We Know, Gallery Press, Wake Forest University Press, 2008
2008: Collected Poems, Gallery Press, 2008, Wake Forest University Press, 2009
2009: On the Night Watch, Gallery Press; Wake Forest University Press 2010
2010: Until Before After, Gallery Press; Wake Forest University Press
2012: In the Light Of, Gallery Press
Prose[edit]
1978: The Lost Explorer, Ulsterman Publications
1986: Irish Traditional Music, Appletree Press
1995: Belfast Frescoes, (with John Kindness) Ulster Museum
1995: Letters from the Alphabet, Gallery Press
1996: Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music, a book about traditional music; Cape; North Point Press (New York), 1997 ISBN 0-86547-511-3
1997: The Star Factory, a memoir of Belfast; Granta
1999: Fishing for Amber, Granta
2001: Shamrock Tea, a novel which was longlisted for the Booker Prize; Granta
2009: The Pen Friend, a web of memory, published by Blackstaff Press
2012: Exchange Place, a novel, published by Blackstaff Press
Translations[edit]
2002: The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (translator), Granta, awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
2005: The Midnight Court, (translation of Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mhéan Oíche, Gallery Press; Wake Forest University Press, 2006
2007: The Táin, Penguin Classics
2012: From Elsewhere, (translations of Jean Follain's poetry, paired with original poem/meditations on the same) Gallery Press
Prizes and awards[edit]
1978: Eric Gregory Award
1987: Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize for The Irish for No
1990: Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry for Belfast Confetti
1993: T. S. Eliot Prize for First Language: Poems
1997: Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year) for The Star Factory
2003: Cholmondeley Award for Breaking News
2003: Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) for Breaking News
Ciaran Carson
1948–2019
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, into an Irish-speaking family, poet Ciarán Carson attended Queen’s University, Belfast. He held the position of traditional arts officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998 and was appointed director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University in 2003.
Carson was the author of a number of collections of poetry, including The Irish for No (1987), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; Belfast Confetti (1989); First Language: Poems (1994), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; Breaking News (2003), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize; For All We Know (2008); On the Night Watch (2010); and Until Before After (2010). Wake Forest University Press has published his work for American readers, including The Midnight Court (2006), a translation of the 18th-century Irish poet Brian Merriman’s work, and Carson’s own Collected Poems (2009).
Carson’s work is both political and personal as it engages recent history—including the Troubles and violence in Northern Ireland—and the past. In The Irish for No, Carson’s long lines encompass listings of both urban realities and nostalgic images of the past, linking memory and cartography to give a portrait of life in Belfast. The more recent On the Night Watch and Until Before After offer more personal lyrics.
Carson’s interest in traditional Irish music informed Last Night’s Fun: About Music, Food and Time (1997), a book of prose, and the history of Belfast plays in his memoir, The Star Factory (1998). Carson was also author of the novel Shamrock Tea (2001). He died in late 2019.
Ciaran Carson
FictionNon-FictionPoetryShort StoriesTranslation
Born:
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Publishers:
Granta PublicationsPenguin Group (UK)The Gallery Press
Agents:
The Susijn Agency
Biography
Poet and novelist Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1948. After graduating from Queen's University, Belfast, he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland until 1998. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.
His collections of poetry include The Irish for No (1987), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; Belfast Confetti (1990), which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry; and First Language: Poems (1993), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. His prose includes The Star Factory (1997) and Fishing for Amber (1999) and his novel, Shamrock Tea (2001), explores themes present in Jan van Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Marriage.
His translation of Dante's Inferno was published in November 2002. Breaking News (2003), won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year). His poetry collection For All We Know (2008), was shortlisted for both the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award. A further collection, On the Night Watch, was published in 2009.
Ciaran Carson is also an accomplished musician, and is the author of Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music (1996), a study of Irish traditional music. He was Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast, until his retirement in 2015. He still acts as moderator of the Belfast Writers' Group and a postgraduate poetry workshop. He lives in Belfast.
His 2010 collection of poetry Until Before After was shortlisted for the 2011 Irish Times Poetry Now Award; and his 2015 collection From Elsewhere was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Critical perspective Bibliography Awards
Critical perspective
Over the past three decades, Ciaran Carson has produced a diverse body of work encompassing poetry, prose, translations, a novel of sorts, and writings on literature and Irish traditional music. His oeuvre is bound inextricably both to his home city of Belfast, the history, topography, nomenclature and eccentricities of which have proved seemingly inexhaustible sources of material, and to Irish music, whose improvisatory qualities and facility for story telling influence much of his work. The poetry has become increasingly both allusive and elusive, characterised by the density of its references and by rambling journeys through and across time and space, occasioned by linguistic association and the tracking of connections and patterns between colours, forms and smells.
His first collection of poetry, The New Estate (1976), is calm and measured in form and tone, and in terms of content, outlines many of the preoccupations evident in later works: fragmented autobiographical memories, the Troubles, found objects and named places in Belfast. The business of naming is of constant interest to Carson, whose first language is Irish, and etymological investigations are a crucial and distinctive feature of his work.
The collections The Irish for No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1990) marks a new departure for Carson, formally and in his approaches to the subject matter: intensely psycho-geographical, in both works a forensic and scholarly analytical approach combines with colloquial and demotic storytelling, in complex excavations of the hidden histories of his home city and explorations of its traumatic contemporary life. These collections mark the first appearance of Carson’s distinctive use of the long line. Deriving partly from the American poet C. K. Williams, partly from Irish traditional music, and partly from the Japanese 17-syllable haiku (examples of which separate many of the poems in the second collection) this mode of composition frees Carson to plunge further into the chaotic webs created by the intersections of language, history and geography in Troubles afflicted Belfast. Adjectives pile up as the improvisatory qualities of traditional Irish story telling and music are skilfully contained within the controlled formal structures provided by these long lines. The prefatory poem ‘Turn Again’ appears in editions of both collections:
'There is a map of the city which shows the bridge that was never built,
A map which shows the bridge that collapsed; the streets that never existed.
Ireland’s Entry, Elbow Lane, Weigh-House Lane, Back Lane, Stone Cutter’s Entry –
Today’s plan is already yesterday’s – the streets that were there are gone.
And the shape of the jails cannot be shown for security reasons.'
This has been described by the critic Alan Gillis as ‘meta-cartography’, whereby traditional maps, records of single specific moments, and thus unable to represent the heterogeneity of the past, are superseded by Carson’s poetic rendering of places that no longer exist alongside those still present ‘reconceiving the past as a boundless layering of present-tense moments’ (Alan Gillis, ‘Ciaran Carson: Beyond Belfast’). His work is deeply concerned with the fragments of material history, whereby the discovery or memory of an object sparks ruminations, flights and journeys into urban or historical labyrinths. In the five-page poem ‘Dresden’ from The Irish for No a china shepherdess falls from the trembling hand of a veteran of RAF Bomber Command during the Second World War, who had flown missions over that city:
'One day, reaching up to hold her yet again, his fingers stumbled, and she fell.
He lifted down a biscuit tin, and opened it.
It breathed an antique incense: things like pencils, snuff, tobacco.
His war medals. A broken rosary. And there, the milkmaid’s creamy hand, the outstretched
Pitcher of milk, all that survived.'
Without labouring the symbolic properties of the object, Carson manages to make the mass-produced detritus of the twentieth century seem as precious here as the relics of more ancient times. From the same volume, ‘Calvin Klein’s Obsession’ (his writings are studded with brand names, their various resonances fully exploited) journeys through various smells from his past, such as those of beer, the perfume worn by an old girlfriend, horse dung, soap and wisteria, in the process weaving together personal and cultural history, addressing the fleeting glamour of consumerism directly in the final line: ‘Or maybe it’s the name you buy, and not the thing itself.’
Although Belfast has continued to impress itself on Carson’s work, during the 1990s and 2000s his poetry ranged more widely, and arguably became more overtly erudite and learned. Opera Et Cetera (1996) is particularly complex, made up of four sequences drawn together by a formal debt to the Irish ballad metre: the alphabetical series ‘Letters of the Alphabet’; ‘Opera’, a series similarly built around the radio operator’s code; ‘Et Cetera’, poems taking their cue from Latin tags; and ‘Alibi’, translations of short poems by the Romanian poet Stefan Augustin Doinas. In The Alexandrine Plan (1998) Carson translates sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud, and followed this with further translations of The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (2002) and Irish mythological epic The Tain (2007).
These projects were perhaps balanced by the prose works Last Night’s Fun: About Time, Food and Music (1996) and The Star Factory (1997). The former is a vibrant exploration of Carson’s love of traditional Irish music (for much of his life he was traditional music and culture officer of the Arts Council for Northern Ireland, spending much time playing music in bars and back rooms across the island), which also encompasses such matters as whiskey, Gaelic Games and the constitution of the ideal fried breakfast. The Star Factory is Carson’s most overtly autobiographical work to date, a series of sensory explorations of Belfast’s history and Carson’s childhood familiar to readers of Belfast Confetti. The essays emphasise the encyclopaedic nature of Carson’s project, seen in his repeated recourse to reference works such as the Belfast Street Directory of 1948, the year of his birth. In 2001 Carson published Shamrock Tea, a ‘novel’ that defies categorisation, a semi-fictional, fantastical and psychedelic odyssey through history, philosophy and art, and, of course, Belfast, in which the drinking of the titular concoction thrusts characters including an autobiographical analogue of Carson himself into the world of Jan Van Eyck’s painting, 'The Arnolfini Portrait'.
Carson’s most recent poems have moved away from Belfast and the Troubles. Breaking News (2003) also drops the long line, in dramatic fashion: some of the poems in this collection are pared back to one word per line. For All We Know (2008) exhibits a softer side to Carson, consisting of love poems dedicated to his wife: though references to the May 1968 Paris riots, bombs in Belfast and the Stasi are allowed to intrude, the emphasis here is on life and experience shared.
Guy Woodward, 2009
Bibliography
2015
From Elsewhere
2012
In the Light of: After Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud
2010
Until Before After
2009
The Pen Friend
2009
On the Night Watch
2008
For All We Know
2008
Collected Poems
2007
The Tain
2005
The Midnight Court/Brian Merriman
2003
Breaking News
2002
The Inferno of Dante Alighieri
2001
Shamrock Tea
1999
The Twelfth of Never
1999
Fishing for Amber
1999
The Ballad of HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems
1998
The Alexandrine Plan
1997
The Star Factory
1996
Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music
1996
Opera Et Cetera
1995
Belfast Frescoes
1995
Letters from the Alphabet
1993
First Language: Poems
1990
Belfast Confetti
1988
The New Estate and Other Poems
1987
The Irish for No
1986
Irish Traditional Music
1978
The Lost Explorer
1976
The New Estate
Awards
2015
Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection (shortlist)
2008
Costa Poetry Prize (shortlist)
2008
T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist)
2003
Cholmondeley Award
2003
Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection
1997
Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year)
1993
T. S. Eliot Prize
1990
Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry
1987
Alice Hunt Bartlett Award
1978
Eric Gregory Award
Ciaran Carson’s Urgent, Hopeful, Final Lines
By Kevin YoungOctober 8, 2019
Given a short time to live, Ciaran Carson emerged with poems reconsidering art and life, determined but not deterministic, not falsely hopeful but fully in the moment.Photograph by Michael Oreal / VISUM / Redux
The news of the death of the poet Ciaran Carson seems all the more sorrowful because it was not unexpected. After a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, last spring, he knew that he was dying, and, thus, those who knew him did, too—but can one ever prepare?
If anything, death focussed Carson, bringing a burst of poems that seemed to know that they were his last—and, also, knew how to last. The ones I’ve seen (the magazine recently published two of them) looked not so much at the inevitable as at the surprises along the way. These final poems, which riff off of other works of art, will appear in a book, “Still Life,” from Ireland’s revered The Gallery Press, later this month. Finished in a season, the poems will be released in another, which Carson will not see the end of. He was seventy years old.
I’ve known Carson’s work since his groundbreaking “Belfast Confetti,” which was published in 1989. I still have the Gallery Press edition. I was in London after graduating from college, having used some prize money to travel, and was struck by the active poetry readership there—poems were in the newspapers and in the air, which guided me to Carson’s work. His poems were wild and willful and all their own, though they wrestled with the rich Irish legacy of poets—he was part of the Belfast Group—and with the Troubles still echoing. Carson saw the violence in terms of language, punctuation even:
Suddenly as the riot squad moved in it was raining exclamation marks,
Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion
Itself—an asterisk on the map.
In a short statement, his longtime publisher, Peter Fallon, said that it was “not an exaggeration to compare his mapping of Belfast with Joyce’s of Dublin,” and I see it now covered with asterisks and asking.
I continued to read Carson, and when I became a curator of literary collections at Emory University, more than a decade ago, which entailed, among other things, overseeing the deep Irish collections there, I returned fully to his work. He had been prolific in between, translating the Inferno, translating work from the Irish—his first language—and writing the looser, unpunctuated, punchy lines collected in “On the Night Watch,” from 2010. That book seemed to mark a change, an erasing of form to invoke not so much speech as an inner dialogue with poetry—and consciousness itself.
I also finally met him, on a street in St. Andrews, I think it was, where we’d been brought for a book festival. He had been bearded when I first read him; now he was clean-shaven and natty, and, as we passed on the street, I recognized him only as I went by. Ten paces later, he shouted, “Are you Kevin Young?” We spoke a few minutes, mostly of curatorial matters, then went our own ways. I must say that, in those years of heading the Irish collections at Emory, it helped to be Irish at least in name.
But it also helped to be a poet, to understand the poet’s whims and wishes—and to be able to occasionally enjoy a pint. More important, I had studied with Seamus Heaney, and felt the connection that Irish poets and black poets often feel, sharing an experience of fighting for freedom in a nation not always their own, and writing in an English that they’ve made their own.
Later, Carson and I would read together, sharing stages and backstages, which can be oddly bonding. We read at the Seamus Heaney HomePlace, where Carson also played traditional Irish music, a passion of his. I was able to help usher additional papers belonging to Carson into the collections, including some unpublished work that he possessed by Raymond Carver, whom he had known before Carver’s own untimely death.
Death always feels untimely. To write at all is to write against that feeling of impending loss, but poetry more than most any other medium mediates the experience of death—not just through the urgency of elegy but through contemplations of mortality that are too often pushed aside in a clickbait culture that mostly misunderstands what “urgent” means. Death is part of life—the paradox felt in our bones but also in the best of our lines, which are, in some deep sense, written under a sentence of death.
Often a poet’s last poems appear to be aware of this paradox. Sometimes that’s accidental, the elegiac being a favored mode of poets. In Carson’s case, this lastness was literal—given a short time to live he emerged with poems reconsidering art and life, determined but not deterministic, not falsely hopeful but fully in the moment. Their long lines suggest full breath and heartbeat, finding and filling in as much to say as is necessary or possible, getting it all in before the end of the line, emerging less tragic than triumphant.
Right now, as I write this in the disappearing dark, my son is cracking his knuckles, awake in the dawn—a habit I hate but that today seems like life itself, or its sound. In short, poetry.
I know the words are the hope, but I hope there are more than words.
Kevin Young became The New Yorker’s poetry editor in 2017. He is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at the New York Public Library, and is the author of, most recently, “Brown.”Read more »
QUOTE:
"He went on to transfigure his native city, and transfix his readers, with a rich accumulation of poems, metafictions and other unclassifiable prose works." Craig added: "Carson had Belfast lore and topography at his fingertips, but he superimposed a psychic overlay on the city’s mundane streets and terraces, its feuds and factions, the aggravations and atrocities of the bloody 30-year Troubles."
Ciaran Carson obituary
Poet who superimposed a psychic overlay on the streets and terraces of his native Belfast
Patricia Craig
Sun 6 Oct 2019 17.27 BST
Last modified on Wed 30 Oct 2019 17.50 GMT
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Ciaran Carson at his home in Belfast in 2009. He was a longstanding member of Aosdána, the association of Irish artists. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian
The poet Ciaran Carson, who has died aged 70 of cancer, grew up in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast. He went on to transfigure his native city, and transfix his readers, with a rich accumulation of poems, metafictions and other unclassifiable prose works, the most recent of which, Exchange Place (2012), was lauded for its elegance and precision.
Carson had Belfast lore and topography at his fingertips, but he superimposed a psychic overlay on the city’s mundane streets and terraces, its feuds and factions, the aggravations and atrocities of the bloody 30-year Troubles.
The title of his 1989 collection, Belfast Confetti, can refer to the debris falling after an explosion, bits of type erupting from a typewriter (as in its cover image), or a hail of bullets. The high-pressure contents of this book are compressed into an enigmatic and exhilarating pattern of reflections and events.
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Belfast Confetti is dedicated to the poet’s father: William Carson, a postman and Irish-language aficionado. He is a strong presence in his son’s literary output. Ciaran’s mother, Mary Maginn, a one-time mill-girl, gets a look-in too; but the father is predominant. From Carson Sr, Ciaran inherited a love of Irish (the five children of the family grew up bilingual), a flair for traditional music and storytelling and a respect for education as a way of making a mark in the world.
Following his schooling at St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ grammar school, Ciaran went on to study for a degree in English at Queen’s University – where one of his tutors was Seamus Heaney, and two other poets, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon, were fellow students.
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He subsequently became an officer with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, with responsibility for traditional music, and throughout the 1970s and 80s travelled all over Ireland, playing the flute and the tin whistle in pubs and back rooms, often accompanied by his future wife Deirdre Shannon (herself a gifted fiddle-player). They married in 1982.
One result of all this jollification was the eccentric and beguiling prose account of those heady days, Last Night’s Fun (1996). “One of the most inventive looks at Irish music,”a reviewer called it, while John Banville summed it up in four words: “Wild nights; ashen days”. It’s the wild nights, with all their spark and fervour, that stay in the mind.
The New Estate (1976) announced the arrival on the poetic scene of a confident new voice. By 1987, however, the lyrical tone of this first book had given way to the disruptions and dislocations of The Irish for No, as “Belfast tore itself apart and patched itself up again”.
Other collections followed with increasing rapidity: First Language (1993); Opera Et Cetera (1996), with its display of technical virtuosity; and the marvellously subversive and narcotic sonnet sequence The Twelfth of Never (1998), in which some of Ireland’s most cherished myths and symbols are taken to pieces and audaciously reassembled.
At the same time, the poetry was interspersed with idiosyncratic prose works: Fishing for Amber (1999), Shamrock Tea (2001), The Pen Friend (2009), and The Star Factory (1997). The last is Carson’s partly autobiographical, wholly inspirational book about Belfast, which evokes the poet’s “dark city” in all its pungency and particularity.
Asked by the Irish Times earlier this year to nominate his current favourite book, Muldoon chose Carson’s From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations (2018). Praising his “ability to find connections in so many aspects of the world”, he was echoing an earlier comment of his own, that Carson, as an incomparable poet and luminous prose writer, was “terrifically engaged by everything and anything – stamp-collecting, hurley, cooking”.
It is this abundance, alongside felicity of expression, humour and immense erudition, that gives Carson’s work its wonderful zest and intricacy.
Other recognition came in the form of the TS Eliot prize, the Irish Times Irish literature prize, the Cholmondeley award, and the Forward prize. Carson’s achievement as a translator was acknowledged with the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation prize in 2002, for his version of Dante’s Inferno; he also translated The Táin (2007) and many poems from the original Irish, as well as the French poet Jean Follain (From Elsewhere, 2014). Influences absorbed and cast in a new light – Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keats, Borges, Calvino, Flann O’Brien, Alberto Manguel – impart a cosmopolitan flavour to Carson’s oeuvre, without diluting its intense attachment to his home territory.
Some years after resigning from the Arts Council, Carson became the first director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s, a post he held from 2004 until his retirement in 2016. He was a longstanding member of Aosdána, the association of Irish artists.
Stylish in his bones, he might have applied his comment on Follain – that he “was invariably properly dressed for every occasion” – to himself, with his love of traditional hand-made suits and shoes, antique tweed jackets, silk shirts and subtle ties. “Hardy-handsome,” Heaney called him, referring to the portrait of Carson by Jeffrey Morgan, “with his Black Mountain behind him and his talismanic flute …”
Carson remained characteristically stoical in the face of his illness. His first action on receiving the diagnosis of lung cancer was to embark on a series of poems, ostensibly about paintings (by Poussin, Canaletto and Thomas Jones, among others), but also celebrating his life with Deirdre in a particular part of north Belfast, and of the area itself. The new poems, under the title Still Life, will be published this month.
His poem Letters from the Alphabet, reaches “Z”, the end-point, and culminates in a two-line stanza that makes an appropriate valediction for the postman’s son: “In the morning you will open up the envelope. You will get whatever/ Message is inside. It is for all time. Its postmark is The Twelfth of Never.”
He is survived by Deirdre and their children, Manus, Gerard and Mary.
• Ciaran Carson, poet, born 9 October 1948; died 6 October 2019
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"captured the pungency, tensions and rich heritage of Northern Ireland, especially his native Belfast." Genzlinger further commented: "Mr. Carson — who was also a translator, working in several languages — viewed writing poetry not as an exercise in setting down an idea, but as an exploration."
Ciaran Carson, Versatile Belfast Poet, Is Dead at 70
In his poetry, as well as in his prose, he conveyed the complexities of his city and his country.
The Belfast-born writer Ciaran Carson in an undated photo. The president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, said Mr. Carson’s poetry and prose “revealed a deep love of place.”
Credit...
Deirdre Carson
By Neil Genzlinger
Published Oct. 9, 2019
Updated Oct. 11, 2019
Ciaran Carson, whose poetry and prose captured the pungency, tensions and rich heritage of Northern Ireland, especially his native Belfast, died in that city on Oct. 6. He was 70.
Laura Susijn of the Susijn Agency, which represented him, said the cause was lung cancer.
Mr. Carson was perhaps best known as a poet, and his most acclaimed collection may have been “Belfast Confetti,” published in 1989.
“Carson’s lanky verses and prose poems have made poetry out of the scary complexities of the distraught city,” Thomas D’Evelyn wrote of that volume in The Christian Science Monitor. Its title poem begins with a jarring collision of imagery:
Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks,
Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion
Itself — an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire …
I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering.
All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.
He experimented with structure, and his style evolved, from longer lines to shorter, fragmented ones.
“I can’t say why the forms in which I write have changed so radically over the years,” he told the Wake Forest University Press in 2010, “but it seems we should adopt new methods for new situations. The situation demands the form.”
His exploratory nature also infused a wide variety of prose works. There was the mosaic-like “Shamrock Tea” (2001), which, as The Guardian put it, “claims to be a novel but might equally be filed under History, Philosophy, Art, or Myth and Religion.” There was the idiosyncratic memoir “The Star Factory” (1997), which The Chicago Tribune called “a positive, loving, even celebratory evocation, the work of a man determined to live an ordinary urban life, and to clear in it a place for the imagination.” There was “Last Night’s Fun,” his meditation on traditional Irish music, each chapter bearing the title of a beloved song.
“He leaves such a wide body of work that people will have their own favourites, including the magnificent ‘Belfast Confetti,’” the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, said in a statement. “Representing Belfast in all its variety, the memoirs and books, such as ‘The Star Factory,’ revealed a deep love of place.”
Ciaran (pronounced KEER-ahn) Gerard Carson was born on Oct. 9, 1948, in Belfast to William and Mary (Maggin) Carson. His father was a postman, and his mother worked in linen mills. The family was Roman Catholic and bilingual, speaking the Irish language at home, and Mr. Carson grew up with an appreciation of words, their origins and their sounds.
“I used to lull myself to sleep with language,” he wrote in “The Star Factory,” “mentally repeating, for example, the word capall, the Irish for horse, which seemed to me more onomatopoeically equine than its English counterpart; gradually, its trochaic foot would summon up a ghostly echo of ‘cobble,’ till, wavering between languages, I would allow my disembodied self to drift out the window and glide through the silent dark gas-lit streets above the mussel-coloured cobblestones.”
He earned a degree in English in 1971 at Queen’s University, Belfast, then in 1975 took a job with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He would remain there until 1998, dealing first with traditional music and then literature. His first poetry collection, “The New Estate,” was published in 1976.
His poetry often addressed the tensions inherent in living in Belfast during troubled times. “Last Orders,” from “Belfast Confetti,” begins starkly:
Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but
It’s someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens. Like electronic
Russian roulette, since you never know for sure who’s who, or what
You’re walking into.
Another collection, “Selected Poems” (2001), included a work titled simply “Fear”:
I fear the vast dimensions of eternity.
I fear the gap between the platform and the train.
I fear the onset of a murderous campaign.
I fear the palpitations caused by too much tea.
I fear the drawn pistol of a rapparee.
I fear the books will not survive the acid rain.
I fear the ruler and the blackboard and the cane.
I fear the Jabberwock, whatever it might be.
I fear the bad decisions of a referee.
I fear the only recourse is to plead insane.
I fear the implications of a lawyer’s fee.
I fear the gremlins that have colonized my brain.
I fear to read the small print of the guarantee.
And what else do I fear? Let me begin again.
Mr. Carson — who was also a translator, working in several languages — viewed writing poetry not as an exercise in setting down an idea, but as an exploration.
“The kind of examination question which used to be put, ‘What did the poet have in mind when he said …’ is an assumption that the poet clothes his thought in verse,” he told The Spectator in 2012, “whereas the poet often doesn’t know what he has in mind: He follows the language, and sees where it might lead him, which is usually a very different place from what he thought at the onset.
“If you know exactly what you are going to say in a poem,” he continued, “that poem will be a failure. Besides, there is no interest or fun, in saying what you already know.”
Mr. Carson, who was a skilled flutist, married Deirdre Shannon, an accomplished fiddle player, in 1982. She survives him, as do their three children, Manus, Gerard and Mary; and four siblings, Caitlin, Pat, Brendan and Liam.
Mr. Carson had been struggling with cancer for some time, and some of his most recent poems mused on the approaching end of his life. One, called “Claude Monet: ‘The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil,’ 1880,” published just two months ago in The New Yorker and part of “Still Life,” a collection to be published by Wake Forest University Press early next year, concluded this way:
How strange it is to be lying here listening to whatever it is is going on.
The days are getting longer now, however many of them I have left.
And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily outlast their end.
Ciaran Carson
1948–2019
Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on October 9, 1948. He attended Queen's University, Belfast—not long after Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon—and received his degree in English. He worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998, when he became a professor of English at Queen's University, Belfast. There, he was appointed Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre in 2003. That same year, he was made an honorary member of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association.
Carson authored several books of poetry and prose, and has been recognized for his work in translation. Of his poetry, his U.S. publications include most recently From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations (Wake Forest University Press, 2019), On the Night Watch (Wake Forest University Press, 2010) and For All We Know (Wake Forest University Press, 2008). His 2002 novel Shamrock Tea was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and his translation of The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (Granta Books, 2002) was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Carson has received several awards, including the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, the Forward Poetry Prize, and a Cholmondeley Award. He died on October 6, 2019.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations (Wake Forest University Press, 2019)
On the Night Watch (Wake Forest University Press, 2010)
For All We Know (Wake Forest University Press, 2008)
The Midnight Court (Wake Forest University Press, 2006)
Breaking News (Wake Forest University Press, 2003)
The Twelfth of Never (Wake Forest University Press, 1998)
The Alexandrine Plan (Wake Forest University Press, 1998)
Opera Et Cetera (Wake Forest University Press, 1996)
First Language (Wake Forest University Press, 1994)
Belfast Confetti (Wake Forest University Press, 1989)
Prose
Shamrock Tea (Granta UK, 2002)
Fishing for Amber: A Long Story (Granta Books, 2000)
The Star Factory (Granta UK, 1998)
Last Night's Fun (North Point Press, 1998)
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A book of cherished things; of intimacies; of marvels; and these in the sight of death. The courage of all this, and the tenderness and joy in its pages, is almost impossible to fathom. Miraculous, ordinary, tender, true
Ciaran Carson’s Still Life: courage and joy, miraculous, ordinary, tender and true
Gail McConnell’s speech at last night’s posthumous launch of Ciaran Carson’s Still Life
Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 14:58
Gail McConnell
Ciaran Carson: an extraordinary, utterly fearless and unsentimental capacity to stand in the sight of death and not look away. Photograph: Manus Carson.
Good evening. To be with you this evening to introduce Still Life at Ciaran’s request is an honour impossible to describe.
This is a day of celebration.
Today we celebrate Deirdre and Ciaran’s anniversary – a day, a date, a time, a memory, a moment, a lifetime Ciaran writes into the third chapter of Fishing for Amber. It is the C chapter – C for Clepsydra, the water-clock – in which we read, “I was married to Deirdre Shannon on the 16th of October 1982, in St Comgall’s Church in Antrim town. The reception was held at the Cranfield Inn some few miles away, on the shores of Lough Neagh.” The story takes a turn from here, to water-lore, the story having begun, of course, many years before, when Deirdre and Ciaran met, playing tunes, as they would go on to play and to make an extraordinary music together over the decades to come.
And today we celebrate the publication of this precious book – this late, great book of poems by Ciaran Carson, Still Life. Which is, first and foremost, a book of love poems – a book of poems about how love happens, moment to moment, frame to frame, year to year.
On the book’s cover, we see Hare Bowl, the still life painted by his friend Jeffrey Morgan. It shows, Ciaran’s poem tells us, ‘them two hares / At full stretch running off to the right on the curve of the bowl’. When I saw Ciaran last, he lifted down this painting from the wall and bid me hold it to the light. ‘We’re the hares’, he said with a grin, ‘me and Deirdre. At least I like to think so.’
Ciaran, alas, is not here.
&
Ciaran is nowhere else.
Tonight we will hear three poems from Still Life, read by three people whose lives, whose writing, whose habits of mind, (I would hazard) have been fundamentally formed by Ciaran’s presence and pages. As is true, indeed, for so many of us gathered here.
In a few moments I’ll invite Stephen Connolly, Alice Lyons and Scott McKendry to read three of Ciaran’s poems for us.
First, I’d like to say a few words about Still Life. (More specifically, about cells, love, lemons and stanzaic landscapes.)
Over the course of the past 10 days, I’ve found myself thinking about a sentence Ciaran wrote and gifted to me for the back of my first pamphlet of poems. It is this:
As the great French poet Francis Ponge has it in his Mollusc, “The least cell of our body clings as tightly to language, as language has us in its grip.”
That mutual grasp – us holding language; language holding us – was of endless interest and excitement to Ciaran, as it became for so many of us who knew the pleasure of his friendship. That mutual grasp and the transformations it makes possible.
‘Cell’ was a word we often spoke of, gripped by its various implications: a simple structure; a storeroom; a chamber for sleeping or writing; the small back room he liked so much, where the music of what happens happens; a compartment in the brain; the hexagon in a honeycomb; a room in a prison; a nucleus of political activity; the body’s tissue; a cavity; and, to quote the OED 15a, as Ciaran would have me do: ‘The fundamental, usually microscopic, structural and functional unit of all living organisms’.
Ciaran has always been attentive to the world at the cellular level. Nothing escapes his eye and ear – the paintings of Vermeer, the Muji pen, the texture of the yarn, the pallor of a ping-pong ball, the trembling of the window, after the explosion - the bits of text that stay.
To all of it he gives fundamental, microscopic attention, finding and composing new structures with each extraordinary new book. Attending not just to the word within a phrase, but to its very cells: the single letter within the alphabet; the punctuation marks. This is just one part of his genius.
Still Life contains some of the best poems he has written; some of the best poems in the language. It comes as no surprise that here Ciaran is attentive, too, to the cells of his own body and what they may hold.
In the first poem: ‘You listen to the body talking, exfoliating itself cell after cell.’
In the second: ‘See-through cellophane’
In the third, even more embedded now, ‘par excellence’ in the ‘cellar’
Also ‘celluloid’ which takes me back to ‘the celluloid diminuendo’ of his extraordinary poem Snow.
And lastly, in the unbearably good poem, ‘Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648: we find ‘little cells of people on the very/ Verge of legibility, but never insignificant.’
In its fearless look at death, and its careful weighing of what can truly be said in its sight, Still Life exists ‘on the very/ Verge of legibility’. (A phrase broken by a line break: ‘very/ verge’)
From the first poem on, legibility is one of its concerns: handwriting and print in pencil or ink that is clear, readable. We see Ciaran in the act of writing and in the act of reading. Picking up a retractable pencil made in 1931, looking for a Biro, finding a Bic, asking for a Muji pen and, from his nurse’s needle, musing on the cannula, ‘the Latin for a little reed’, through which flows the needed ink. And we see him in what he liked to call ‘the ekphrasis factory’, looking at paintings and reading art criticism – work by James Elkins, Tom Lubbock, and, the book that most profoundly informs Still Life, TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death.
Ciaran and I shared a love of Clark’s book. We spoke about it often over the years. Simple in design, complex in its way of seeing, it’s a book in which Clark contemplates two paintings by Poussin – Landscape with a Calm; and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. Subtitled ‘an experiment in art writing’, the book is written as a series of diary entries, with details from the paintings shown in high resolution images on almost every pair of pages – clusters of cells from the canvas.
I’ve been reading it again these last few days.
So much of what Clark sees in Poussin’s paintings is true of Ciaran’s Still Life. Above all, an extraordinary, utterly fearless and unsentimental capacity to stand in the sight of death and not look away. What both of these great artists offer us is a dialectical account of life and death – a way of being in contraries, (the kind WB Yeats learned from William Blake). A stance, a stanza, a space for Keats’s negative capability – ‘a capacity for being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In the poem after Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm, Ciaran turns to Keats’s great poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn – music, animation and love figured in what he calls ‘the stock-still moment’ of the work of art. Ciaran inhabits the Grecian Urn’s paradoxical condition: living and writing with balance, poise and grace in the knowledge of death and time’s passage. We hear and see this stilling and fusing of contraries in the book’s title.
Still Life places us in the sight of death, yes. And it does so in an elaborate, symphonic, abundant celebration of beauty. With cellular attention to lemons, for a start. And lemon scents and lemon hues, in a poem after Angela Hackett’s Lemons on a Moorish Plate, 2013. To my ear, this is one of the finest poems in the language. I can’t begin to elaborate why – you’ll hear it shortly.
But to list just a few things I admire in the poem:
its basis in intimate talk – the conversations shared by Ciaran and Deirdre across the decades - and its casual asides (‘You know how lemons…’);
I love its nimble drift – its shuttlings in time and memory from present, past and future;
its ways of ‘summoning up the names of yesteryear’ in significantly branded lists: ‘Yardley’s April Violets’ - which takes us back to older poems, like Calvin Klein’s Obsession;
there are its loving modes of dating – the first date entrusted to us is Deirdre’s birthday: December the 18th; and its marking of the present moment of writing
its way of seeing life – in ‘degrees… of ripeness or decay’;
its loving, local geographies - not only of Ciaran and Deirdre’s home on Glandore Avenue, but of their bedroom, where the painting hangs;
its careful weighing up of form and matter – husk and flesh;
its fearless contemplation of the life cycle;
and its final, joyous exclamation: ‘How clean and fresh and green are the newly sprung leaves of the chestnut tree!’
All of Ciaran’s poems are ‘for Deirdre’ – she was, he said, the only audience he needed. But this poem is even more explicit in its dedication ‘for Deirdre’.
As for the form, continuity and innovation. Still variations on the sonnet form - here we have 3 x 14 line stanzas, with a noticeable turn after the eighth line in the final stanza in particular (a turn to the sight of death) and still the long lines Ciaran began to spin in The Irish for No (1987). It’s a mode of composition he reflects on in Still Life:
Back in the 80s I measured my verse by the width of an A4 page.
For whatever reason
I’ve gone back to that arbitrary rule that turns your thinking
unexpectedly. Though
Necessarily it turns out differently when printed in a book.
The parameters are
Narrower. The line breaks change, and drop a hemistich. So
the landscape
Format of the stanza radically changes shape, becoming
more like a tree
Or a shrub with a dense central trunk - arboreal, in other
words, like these
Which you are viewing now, which I have written
only now.
‘Arboreal’ stanzas with ‘a dense central trunk’. This is the great innovation of Still Life. As we might expect, it is both continuity and departure. For though the lines are long, as they were in Belfast Confetti, First Language and many other books, they are broken anew – broken with intention; broken with a more pronounced indentation than in any of Ciaran’s books to date. What appears to be the latter part of the long first line indented on the second to signify its continuity with the first, is now indented with a gap from the left margin three or four times the width of the gap in all the other books.
What this design invites is a vertical as well as horizontal reading of the poem. The indented lines attain a new legibility. Connecting them by reading every other line down the page, we discover new things hidden in the landscapes of the poems. There are secrets in the trees. Reading Still Life by moving down the page rather than across it we see, in one poem, ‘apertures began/ a new significance’; and, in another, ‘the landscape of his miracles/ in the same frame, here’.
Reading Lemons on a Moorish Plate from left to right, we find ‘A blackbird sings/ From a blackthorn bush.’ But reading the indented lines, ‘A blackbird sings from the Antrim Road of the chestnut tree!’ And so we hear anew the song of Belfast’s own blackbird. The timeless song of the bird of Belfast Lough, and of our blackbird of Glandore.
Thus we see the golden ratio at work. And something of Poussin’s careful spatial composition in the extraordinary stanzaic geometry of Ciaran’s Still Life.
As in Poussin’s paintings, the weave of the canvas is in places palpable. As indeed in Hackett’s painting – unfinished as it was, when Ciaran bought it – the lemons glowing all the more for this. And as with Clark’s book and Poussin’s landscape, there is a politics and an ethics to this cellular attention to contrary states.
Still Life is a book rich with correspondences and echoes for the eye and ear. ‘The lemons – three of them’ are ‘Proceeding in an anticlockwise swirl from pale lemon to a darker yellow/ To an almost orange, tinged with green’. In the final poem and last lines of the book, we see Ciaran ‘admiring/ The blue birds anticlockwise spiralling around the interior of the toilet bowl.’ If these swirling, spiralling movements are Yeatsian gyres, they are perning in the bathroom of a Belfast flat. (Located, as it happens, just across the road from the Seamus Heaney Centre.)
Describing his involvement with the work of Dante, Rimbaud and Follain, Ciaran called his poems translations, adaptions and adoptions. Still Life may be all of these, but it is, above all, a book of transformations. A book of cherished things; of intimacies; of marvels; and these in the sight of death. The courage of all this, and the tenderness and joy in its pages, is almost impossible to fathom. Miraculous, ordinary, tender, true.
These remarks were given at the launch of Ciaran Carson’s posthumous publication, Still Life, published by Gallery Press, on October 16th, 2019 at the Great Hall of Queen’s University Belfast by Dr Gail McConnell.
From There to Here by Ciaran Carson review: Vividly inked verse
It is impossible to do justice to breadth and depth of Carson’s work, but this is a good stab
Ciaran Carson. Photograph: Manus Carson
Martina Evans
Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 06:00
Buy Now
Book Title:
From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations
ISBN-13:
978-1911337508
Author:
Ciaran Carson
Publisher:
Gallery Press
Guideline Price:
€20.00
Ciaran Carson’s retrospective starts with Colm Cille recited, a delightful translation from the middle Irish. Light and sturdy as a coracle, the poem spurts up from the heart of Carson’s oeuvre, “slender-beaked, my pen jets forth/a stream of beetle-coloured ink”.
“Ink” is a key word for Carson, a metaphor for his highly verbal poetry and his painterly, colour-dazzled eye. Its stain is everywhere, from its olfactory presence in the kangaroo pouch of his father’s postbag to his ink-sozzled memoir The Star Factory. Like Hamlet (the star of tremendous maze-like Belfast noir poem of that title in Belfast Confetti) Carson is father-haunted. Unlike Hamlet, the haunting is positive. Carson’s bilingual father, Liam, filled the conches of Carson’s ears with stories, song and two languages, along with a cinematic vision enhanced by tramping the Dedalus labyrinth of an ever-changing Belfast on his postman’s round. This title closely echoes the title of his father’s memoir, Seo, Siúd, agus Siúd Eile, which Carson translates as, “Here, There, and There again ... Translation seems implicit in the title, not least in the sense of moving a thing from one place to another.” Further on, Carson describes himself as his father’s “macasamhla … meaning copy or type” and “type” brings us back to ink again – one brush with Carson’s ludic poetry and you find yourself waltzing with the dictionary and enjoying it.
Translation is creation too – it is not just a matter of copying, although Carson is no stranger to that monkish task either, having hand-transcribed the entire Northern Ireland Civil Service Code Book as a young clerk. Every word has several meanings in Carson’s world, every reading comes up with something different as he simultaneously burrows down and flies over his native city, a shining example of Calvino’s lightness, quickness and multiplicity. His work embodies the dinnseanchas, which is also translation; translation of each place into a story that keeps changing.
Good readers
Borges – surely another godfather to Carson – famously said that good readers are rarer than good writers but Carson is a tremendously visual reader too, a conjurer of aerial views and maps. Looking over the pages of this selection, one sees the extraordinary range of his architectonics since his first publication in 1976. From the long line, sometimes attributed to the influence of CK Williams, through sonnets, haiku-like triplets, to the short couplets that invoke William Carlos Williams, especially his rain-washed wheelbarrow in Breath when the helicopter leaves “a clear blue/space/above my head/I feel /rinsed/clean.”
Paul Muldoon on Still Life by Ciaran Carson: Final testimony to the power of art
‘Ciaran Carson drew Belfast better than anyone I ever read’
Ciaran Carson’s Still Life: courage and joy, miraculous, ordinary, tender and true
There are conversations between poems and conversations with other poets – also a form of translation – the obvious homage to MacNeice in Snow or the barest hint of MacNeice when “curtains fluttered” in the The Irish for No, where Keats is explicit. Later Keats is implicit, in the poppy-induced trances of The Twelfth of Never. Sometimes Carson haunts other poets as in Cocktails – “ … when someone ordered another drink and we entered/The realm of Jabberwocks and Angels’ Wings, Widows’ Kisses, Corpse Revivers.” – when the world is indeed various, suggesting that Carson might have inspired Muldoon’s abecedarian poem, The Birth. The alphabet, of course, is another organising principle in Carson’s poetry, bringing us back to type and ink again.
Explosive lines
Form is related to time, as in keeping time, which comes from the breath. Breath and breathing is a strong presence in many Carson poems, along with those frightening symbols of mortality, clocks, watches and bombs. Time and space converge in Ambition, written when explosions were commonplace, “And if time is a road, then you’re checked again and again/By a mobile checkpoint. One soldier holds a gun to your head/ Another soldier/Asks you questions, and another checks the information/ on the head computer.” And time is still deadly in Night Watch, written during his wife’s illness, “we are what we remember /of each other more than that/the increments by which time/ gains on us/& then retracts/into a darkness that we never /knew till now”.
The final poem is another translation of the emblematic The Blackbird of Belfast Lough, whose ghost whistles through many Carson poems, “The little bird/that whistled shrill/ from the nib of/ its yellow bill…” “Nib” refers to ink again but it is a singing nib, reminding us that Carson, like “Magister Ludi” in The Shadow, “ … is skilled in many disciplines./With a luminous gold stylus he writes a hieroglyph/ on the dark, and so initiates a constellation/from which blossom countless others.”
It is impossible to do justice to the breadth and depth of Carson’s work (which includes fabulous translations of The Táin and Inferno and volumes of wonderful prose) but this fine comprehensive volume is no ordinary selection. The rearrangement or “there to here” of his poems – which have always spoken to each other – calls out clearer and sharper than ever, an interactive treasure chest from one of our greatest living poets.
Martina Evans is a poet and novelist. Her latest book of poems Now We Can Talk Openly About Men is published by Carcanet
Signes: A Review of Ciarán Carson’s “From Elsewhere”
May 28, 2015 | in Reviews | by Farisa Khalid
Farisa Khalid reviews the masterful work of a translating poet
For a poet, there are easier things than translations. The translating poet inevitably has to face the gnawing burden of writing for two people. “It’s a desperate system of double-entry bookkeeping,” Howard Nemerov lamented. The spectral presence of the author is always hovering somewhere, ready to strike whenever the nuance of a word or phrase falters. Even then, the process of translation is seductive. It provides a poet with the rare opportunity to examine the art of another writer, often with intriguing results. The cryptologist’s glee at unveiling messages and new lines of thought converge into the creation of a new kind of work that is as dependent on the translator’s moment in time as much as it is to the author’s.
Many readers may be familiar with Ciarán Carson’s work as translator. His versions of seminal Irish texts Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) and Cúirt An Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court) have a robust freshness and vitality that readily appeals to contemporary audiences. Reading Carson’s Táin, one can sense the sounds, smells, and voices of that particular world of pre-Christian Ireland (now so heavily appropriated into the pop-culture fabric of Game of Thrones).
His newest work, From Elsewhere (Gallery Books, 2014), is a collection of 81 short poems by the French poet Jean Follain (1903-1971), each accompanied by a short poem of Carson’s, an original work inspired by the Follain poem, or, as Carson describes it: “a translation of the translation.” From Elsewhere is certainly not Carson’s first foray into French translation. In 1998 he translated an array of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé in The Alexandrine Plan and in 2012 he published his translations of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, In the Light Of (both published by Wake Forest University Press). Carson brings a certain sharp vitality and contemporaneity to his translations compared to those of Oliver Bernard and John Ashbery. He transposes his experience of Belfast, in its own way, a heaving, Gothic, ghostly metropolis, into his vision of nineteenth-century Paris, and his memories of Belfast shattered by the Troubles into Follain’s haunted visions of his native Normandy, scarred by the Second World War.
Carson is a skilled formalist. His poetry collection, Belfast Confetti (Wake Forest University Press, 1989), famously showcased his adroitness with the long line (partly in homage to C.K. Williams). The opening poem of that collection, “Loaf,” involving Carson’s memories of food, heady conversation, and the onus of writing in Belfast in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, is a tour-de-force of expansive energy and rhythm. Even today, in From Elsewhere, we’re shown what Carson can do with concision, which is a great deal indeed.
The Follain poems, supplied with their original French titles (though the poems themselves only appear in the translated English, not in French) are the sounding-board for Carson’s poems, which range from his memories of Belfast during the Troubles to his meditations on light, landscape, and the endurance of art.
The poems take us through haunting periods of Carson’s life, amid sectarian violence in the 1970s. Here with “The Odds”:
A burst of gunfire
in the bookmaker’s shop
where men are smoking
watching the horses
on television
one of them dying
as the pigeons
on the square outside
transform themselves
into a purple cloud boiling up
from the cobblestones
to the sound of their own applause.
to an atmospheric mood piece like “Night Music”:
In the burned-down library
a man manipulates a keyboard
searching for a passage in the cloud
that might shed light
on what he has in mind
the constellations glitter overhead
in roofless space
from time to time
the wind kicks a tin can down the street
a roulette trickle
stops and starts
shouts from the crowd
in a floodlit stadium
greyhounds pursue the grey electric being
that eludes them time
and time again.
The sound of guns, the ashen detritus of bombed buildings, shards of broken glass and discarded bricks and rubbish collude into becoming an unnatural, natural part of daily life. Follain’s memories of his picturesque native Saint-Lô, shelled and destroyed by German and Allied bombing in the Second World War, is a visceral presence in his poems like “L’île brûlée” (“The Burnt Island”), “Le calme” (“The Calm”) and “Police.”
Two of Carson’s later poems in the book, “Night Music” and “The Given Name” which describe the wonder and eerie beauty of a burnt-out library and a derelict bookshop, reminds one of how conflicts can completely tear through the physical and social landscape of a particular place. In the latter poem, a man makes a remarkable discovery from an old book:
he…blows the dust from it
opens it
at a coloured plate
to behold
the emerald bird
that dazzled for a moment
on the threshold of the world
outside his door
One of the most enjoyable features of the Carson’s approach to translating Follain is the way in which he approaches the more conspicuously quiet Follain poems.
Among them are the elegant reflections of the banal, the quotidian, crafted into mysterious rhythms of the strange unknowable beauty of the evanescent world in front of us, as with Follain’s “L’oeuf” (“The Egg”):
The old lady wipes an egg
with her everyday apron
a heavy ivory-colored egg
an irreproachable egg
then looks at autumn
through her little dormer window
it makes a fine sight
framed just like a picture
nothing there
is out of season
and the fragile egg
nestled in her palm
is the only thing
still fresh.
Follain’s “old lady,” his aproned artist, is rendered in the loving gaze of a Vermeer or Chardin portrait, where we share the sitter’s concentration of an object, as she begins to understand something of the otherness of the world.
The only thing missing in this beautiful volume of translations and poetry are the Follain poems in their original French. When W.S. Merwin completed his masterful translations of Follain’s poetry, The Transparence of the World (Copper Canyon Press, 2003), the volume contained the French poem printed alongside Merwin’s translations, enormously helpful to the discerning reader who could share the poet/translator’s discovery.
In From Elsewhere, one feels a bit cut off from that process, as if he’s being blindfolded and led by the hand into a darkened room. Carson’s translations are every bit as vital and robust as Merwin’s, but I would have liked to have seen how he came by them. Take, for instance, a poem like Follain’s “Signes” (“Signs”), which has some of the same stillness and wonder as “L’oeuf”:
Quand un client parfois dans un restaurant sombre
Décortique une amande
une main vient se poser son étroite épaule
il hésite á finir son verre
In Merwin’s translation, we have:
Sometimes when a customer in a shadowy restaurant
is shelling an almond
a hand comes to rest on his narrow shoulder
he hesitates to finish his glass
With Carson:
Sometimes when a customer in a drab restaurant
is shelling an almond
a hand happens to fall on his thin shoulder
he thinks twice about finishing his wine
Strikingly, “sombre” with Merwin is more in line with the literal French, which suggests “shadowy” or “gloomy.” Carson strips the atmosphere in that small café from its illusions and gives us a “drab” place. He also takes a certain liberty by showing us that the lonely customer is drinking a glass of cheap wine, though the Follain poem, which Merwin translates here, simply says “verre” or “glass,” though of course it seems unlikely that this solitary figure would be drinking something else.
Carson has tried quite deliberately (and successfully) to set his translations apart from Merwin’s. Here, as with his translation of the Táin, Carson brings to his work a certain flinty directness that highlights its emotional tensions in unexpected ways.
“When one translates one cannot avoid taking liberties of one kind or another, “ Carson writes in his introduction. “Perhaps one takes a special liberty in translating Follain, whose attachment to his native language was such that he declared himself unable to learn any other.” This is perhaps more than a mere apologia; It is Carson’s way of coming to terms with the inherent difficulties in translating poems and in the great freedom that it can sometimes bring to writers to build upon the work of another.
For admirers of Carson’s poetry, From Elsewhere is a vital new part of his remarkable oeuvre. Belfast Confetti, perhaps his best-loved collection, has been said to remind readers of the scaling rhythms of traditional Irish music, of which Carson is a noted expert. If we were to extend the comparison to music, the poems in From Elsewhere have some of the introspective phrasings of Erik Satie’s piano pieces and are as crisp and concise. The Follain poems and the accompanying poetry by Carson ought to be soaked in by the reader and savored like a good wine, or as Carson has described, “sampled in due course to see if they’re up to the mark.”
It would be remiss and painfully amateur of me to suppose that the Ciarán Carson translations of Jean Follain’s poems and his accompanying original poetry are like savoring two different, but remarkable, vintages of the same fine wine, but what is striking about From Elsewhere is that it allows the discerning reader to glean a sense of what translation does. Thinking in and out of different languages can be potentially inspiring and liberating, something that many Americans (I am often guilty of this myself) forget to do on a daily basis because of the relative global hegemony of English.
From Elsewhere is a rich, intellectually invigorating new addition to Ciarán Carson’s oeuvre. It is one of the best volumes of original poetry and translations to come out in 2014 and it stands apart from many other works for its cleanness, elegance, and cerebral finesse. Carson’s has an uncanny and distinctive ear for sound, rhythm, and cadence, whether it’s for Irish, the coruscating French of Rimbaud, or the sparse melancholy of Follain’s northern French blues. His particular phenomenology of light and dark and his capacity for scholarly adaptation and experimentation is part of what makes Carson such a celebrated poet today. In working off of Follain’s “Pensée d’octobre” (“October Thoughts”), “How good it is/to drink this fine wine/all by oneself/when evening illuminates the coppery hills,” in “Throwback,” Carson creates a story of boys at play, at once wistful and violent, suffused with light, that describes the precarious back-and-forth of the process of translation and the craft of poetry:
Children throwing stones
over the brick wall
topped with broken bottles
ruby amber green
need not know who
drank the wine
all those years ago
nor what lies on the other side
except that it throws back.