Selected Poems | Ciaran Carson

by Ciaran Carson

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.”

147 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast and educated at The Queen’s University, Belfast. He knows intimately not only the urban Belfast in which he was raised as a native Irish speaker, but also the traditions of rural Ireland. A traditional musician and a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, Carson was long the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is a flutist, tinwhistler, and singer. He is Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is married to fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and has three children.

He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Táin and of Dante’s Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music. Carson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.

Reviews

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because it was a collection, I felt as thought I travelled through his life as a poet. I enjoyed the way he played with form and rhyme.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found myself unable to stay engaged with this collection for more than a poem or two at a time, and then found that rereading the poems wasn't rewarding me. There always seemed to be something veiling them from me, as if one of us, reader or writer, is incapable of getting to the heart of things.