Ciarán Carson
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Ciaran Carson is a poet and novelist born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1948.
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[edit] Life
Carson was born in Belfast into an Irish-speaking family. He attended St Marys CBGS Belfast before proceeding to Queen's University, Belfast to read for a degree in English. 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 Queen's University of Belfast where he established and is the current Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
[edit] 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 Prize. 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 Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Marriage. His translation of Dante's Inferno was published in November 2002. His most recent collection is Breaking News (2003), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).
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 lives in Belfast.
[edit] 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 Muldoon. (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 Heaney. 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. Williams, Louis MacNeice 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 Troubles 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 Ovid, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Carson is deeply influenced by Louis MacNeice 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 gig, on which subject he is an expert (his book about Irish music Last Night's Fun (1996) is regarded as a classic):
'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.
[edit] Bibliography
- The New Estate Blackstaff Press, 1976
- The Lost Explorer Ulsterman Publications, 1978
- Irish Traditional Music Appletree Press, 1986
- The Irish for No Gallery Press, 1987
- The New Estate and Other Poems Gallery Press, 1988
- Belfast Confetti Bloodaxe, 1990
- First Language: Poems Gallery Books, 1993
- Belfast Frescoes (with John Kindness) Ulster Museum, 1995
- Letters from the Alphabet Gallery Press, 1995
- Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music Cape, 1996
- Opera Et Cetera Bloodaxe, 1996
- The Star Factory Granta, 1997
- The Alexandrine Plan (adaptations of sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud) Gallery :Press, 1998
- Fishing for Amber Granta, 1999
- The Ballad of HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems Picador, 1999
- The Twelfth of Never Picador, 1999
- Shamrock Tea Granta, 2001
- The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (translator) Granta, 2002
- Breaking News Gallery Press, 2003
- The Midnight Court (translation of Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mhéan Oíche Gallery Press, 2005
[edit] Prizes and Awards
- 1978 Eric Gregory Award
- 1987 Alice Hunt Bartlett Award The Irish for No
- 1990 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry Belfast Confetti
- 1993 T. S. Eliot Prize First Language: Poems
- 1997 Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year) The Star Factory
- 2003 Cholmondeley Award
- 2003 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) Breaking News
