Selected Poems | Ciaran Carson

Overview

Ciaran Carson’s Selected Poems represents—while yet in full current—the early prodigious poetic creativity of one of Ireland’s great writers. This selection gathers poems from The New Estate (1976), The Irish for No (1987), Belfast Confetti (1989), First Language (1993), Opera Et Cetera (1996), The Alexandrine Plan (1998), and The Twelfth of Never (1998), all published in North America by Wake Forest University Press.In their play, these books plumb and delve so deeply that they touch and transform philosophical, political, and religious ideas. As the English poet Glyn has said, “Time and again, Carson refracts the barren and weary images of Northern Ireland, the graffiti, troops and peace wall, into the infinite possibilities of the Otherwise.”

Author Biography

Born in 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ciaran Carson studied at Queen’s University, Belfast, where, from 2003–2015, he served as the director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Though recently retired from that post, he continues to teach a postgraduate poetry workshop there, in addition to overseeing the Belfast Writers’ Group.Earlier in his career (from 1975–1998), Ciaran Carson acted as an arts officer for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He is also a member of Aosdána and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. A writer of both poetry and prose—fiction and non-fiction alike—Ciaran Carson has also translated many texts, including The Midnight Court, a work of the eighteenth-century poet Brian Merriman, and a version of Dante’s The Inferno, which won the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. His other awards include the first-ever T. S. Eliot Prize (1994, for First Language), and the Forward Prize for Best Collection (2003, for Breaking News).As well as being a significant poet and careful translator, Carson is also a scholar of traditional Irish music; he frequently plays the flute alongside his wife, the accomplished Irish fiddler Deirdre Shannon. He has said: “I’m not interested in ideologies . . . I’m interested in the words, and how they sound to me, how words connect with experience, of fear, of anxiety . . . Your only responsibility is to the language.”