Ciarán Carson, born in
BelfastBelfast is the capital of and the largest city in Northern Ireland, a constituent country of the United Kingdom. It is the seat of devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly. It is the largest urban area in the province of Ulster, and the second largest city on the island of...
,
Northern IrelandNorthern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and it is situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland. It shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
, is a
poetA poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
and novelist. He lives in Belfast.
Ciarán Carson was born in
BelfastBelfast is the capital of and the largest city in Northern Ireland, a constituent country of the United Kingdom. It is the seat of devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly. It is the largest urban area in the province of Ulster, and the second largest city on the island of...
into an
Irish-speakingIrish is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now only spoken natively by a small minority of the Irish population but also plays an important symbolic role in the life of the Irish state, and is used...
family. He attended
St Marys CBGS BelfastSt Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School is a Roman Catholic boys' grammar school in Belfast, Northern Ireland.- History :...
before proceeding to Queen's University, Belfast (QUB) to read for a degree in
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
. After graduation, he worked for over twenty years as the Traditional Arts Officer of the
Arts Council of Northern IrelandThe Arts Council of Northern Ireland is the lead development agency for the arts in Northern Ireland....
. In 1998 he was appointed a Professor of English at QUB where he established, and is the current Director of, the
Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
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 PrizeThe T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded by the Poetry Book Society to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in...
.
Ciarán Carson, born in
BelfastBelfast is the capital of and the largest city in Northern Ireland, a constituent country of the United Kingdom. It is the seat of devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly. It is the largest urban area in the province of Ulster, and the second largest city on the island of...
,
Northern IrelandNorthern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and it is situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland. It shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
, is a
poetA poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
and novelist. He lives in Belfast.
Early years
Ciarán Carson was born in
BelfastBelfast is the capital of and the largest city in Northern Ireland, a constituent country of the United Kingdom. It is the seat of devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly. It is the largest urban area in the province of Ulster, and the second largest city on the island of...
into an
Irish-speakingIrish is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now only spoken natively by a small minority of the Irish population but also plays an important symbolic role in the life of the Irish state, and is used...
family. He attended
St Marys CBGS BelfastSt Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School is a Roman Catholic boys' grammar school in Belfast, Northern Ireland.- History :...
before proceeding to Queen's University, Belfast (QUB) to read for a degree in
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
. After graduation, he worked for over twenty years as the Traditional Arts Officer of the
Arts Council of Northern IrelandThe Arts Council of Northern Ireland is the lead development agency for the arts in Northern Ireland....
. In 1998 he was appointed a Professor of English at QUB where he established, and is the current Director of, the
Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
Work
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 PrizeThe T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded by the Poetry Book Society to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in...
. His prose includes
The Star Factory (1997) and
Fishing for Amber (1999). His most recent novel,
Shamrock Tea (2001), explores themes present in
Jan van EyckJan van Eyck or Johannes de Eyck was a Flemish painter active in Bruges and considered one of the best Northern European painters of the 15th century....
's painting The Arnolfini Marriage. His translation of
DanteDANTE is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various National Research and Education Networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
's
Inferno was published in November 2002.
Breaking News, (2003), won the
Forward Poetry PrizeThe Forward Poetry Prizes were created in 1991. The aim of the prizes is to extend the audience for contemporary poetry. Currently they are the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry competition, with awards for Best Collection , Best First Collection and Best Single Poem...
(Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and a
Cholmondeley AwardThe Cholmondeley Award is an annual award for poetry given by the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom. Awards honour distinguished poets, from a fund endowed by the late Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966...
."The Midnight Court" his rollicking translation of Brian Merriman's 18th century masterpiece 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. His 2009 poem " the ballbag and the butterfly" was voted most influential work by an Irish poet.
Ciarán 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 writes a bi-monthly column on traditional Irish music for The Journal of Music.
In 2007 his translation of the early Irish epic
Táin Bó Cúailngeis a legendary tale from early Irish literature, often considered an epic, although it is written primarily in prose rather than verse...
,
The Táin, was published by Penguin Classics.
Critical Perspective
Carson has managed an unusual marriage in his work between the Irish vernacular story-telling tradition and the witty elusive mock-pedantic scholarship of
Paul MuldoonPaul Muldoon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from County Armagh, Northern Ireland as well as an educator and academic at Princeton University.-Life and work:...
. (Muldoon also combines both modes). In a trivial sense, what differentiates them is line length. As Carol Rumens has pointed out 'Before the 1987 publication of
The Irish for No, Carson was a quiet, solid worker in the groves of
HeaneySeamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He currently lives in Dublin.-Early life:...
. But at that point he rebelled into language, set free by a rangy "long line" that has been attributed variously to the influence of
C. K. WilliamsCharles Kenneth Williams is an American poet.He graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, and received his higher education at the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career as a poet in the early 1960s.Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award...
,
Louis MacNeiceFrederick Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis; nicknamed "MacSpaunday" as a group — a name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco...
and traditional music'.
Carson's first book was
The New Estate (1976). In the ten years before
The Irish for No (1987) he perfected a new style which effects 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 is intensely allusive. In much of his poetry he has a project of sociological scope: to evoke Belfast in encyclopaedic detail. The second half of
The Irish for No was called
Belfast Confetti (1990) 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 TroublesThe Troubles was a period of ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland which spilled over at various times into England, the Republic of Ireland, and mainland Europe. The duration of the Troubles is conventionally dated from the late 1960s and considered by many to have ended with the Belfast...
themselves. The title "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 his next book,
First Language, (1993) that won the T. S. Eliot Prize, language has become the subject. There are translations of
OvidPublius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who wrote about love, seduction, and mythological transformation....
, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Carson is deeply influenced by
Louis MacNeiceFrederick Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis; nicknamed "MacSpaunday" as a group — a name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco...
and he includes 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 is 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 is 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.
Poetry
- 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
- 1990: Belfast Confetti, Bloodaxe, 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
- 2005: The Midnight Court, (translation of Brian Merriman
Brian Merriman or in Irish Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre was an Irish language poet and teacher. His single surviving work of substance, the 1000-line long Cúirt An Mheán Oíche is widely regarded as the greatest comic poem in the history of Irish literature.-Merriman's life:Merriman appears to have...
's Cúirt an Mhéan Oíche, Gallery Press; Wake Forest University Press, 2006
- 2008: For All We Know, Gallery Press, Wake Forest University Press, 2008
- 2008: Collected Poems, Gallery Press, 2008, Wake Forest University Press, 2009
Prose
- 1978
The year 1978 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, a humorous award given annually to books with unusual titles is created. The first winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude...
: The Lost Explorer, Ulsterman Publications
- 1986: Irish Traditional Music, Appletree Press
- 1995: Belfast Frescoes, (with John Kindness
John Kindness is an Irish multi-media artist whose work often contrasts material, image and reference in an unusual and humorous way. He attended the Belfast College of Art and now lives and works in Dublin....
) Ulster Museum
- 1995
The year 1995 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*The Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea is opened by Jimmy Carter....
: Letters from the Alphabet, Gallery Press
- 1996: Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music, a book about traditional music; Cape
- 1997
The year 1997 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Tom Clancy signs a book deal with Pearson Custom Publishing and Penguin Putnam Inc. , giving him US$50 million for the world-English rights to two new books . A second agreement gives him another US$25 million for a...
: The Star Factory, a memoir of Belfast; Granta
- 1999
The year 1999 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*June 19 - Stephen King is hit by a Dodge van while taking a walk. He spends the next three weeks hospitalized...
: Fishing for Amber, Granta
- 2001
The year 2001 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The film version of J. R. R. Tolkien's classic book, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, is released to movie theaters...
: Shamrock Tea, a novel which was longlisted for the Booker Prize; Granta
Translations
- 2002: The Inferno of Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri , commonly known as Dante, was an Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His central work, the Divina Commedia , is often considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.In...
(translator), Granta, awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize
- 2007
The year 2007 in literature involves some significant new books.-Events:*December 11 - Terry Pratchett informs fans on-line that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer's disease.-Literature:*Gilbert Adair - A Mysterious Affair of Style...
: The TáinThe Tain is an EP by The Decemberists released in 2004 by Acuarela Discos and in 2005 by Kill Rock Stars. The single 18-plus minute track is the band's take on the Irish mythological epic Táin Bó Cúailnge which is often simply called The Táin...
, Penguin Classics
Prizes and Awards
- 1978 Eric Gregory Award
The Eric Gregory Award is given by the Society of Authors to British poets under 30 on submission. The awards are up to a sum value of £24000 annually.-Winners:*2009: Liz Berry, James Brookes, Swithun Cooper, Alex McRae, Sam Riviere...
- 1987 Alice Hunt Bartlett Award The Irish for No
- 1990 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry Belfast Confetti
- 1993 T. S. Eliot Prize
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded by the Poetry Book Society to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in...
First Language: Poems
- 1997 Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year) The Star Factory
- 2003 Cholmondeley Award
The Cholmondeley Award is an annual award for poetry given by the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom. Awards honour distinguished poets, from a fund endowed by the late Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966...
- 2003 Forward Poetry Prize
The Forward Poetry Prizes were created in 1991. The aim of the prizes is to extend the audience for contemporary poetry. Currently they are the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry competition, with awards for Best Collection , Best First Collection and Best Single Poem...
(Best Poetry Collection of the Year) Breaking News
External links