The Twelfth of Never

by Ciaran Carson

This collection of poetry is a sequence of 77 sonnets, written in alexandrines, that takes the reader through revolutionary France and Ireland to imperial Japan. The poppy recurs as an emblem of peace and the opium wars, and a fractured vision of an ideal republic gradually emerges.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

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

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

surreal, delicious, cyclical

[Carrie Etter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force collection of sonnets, with wonderfully vigorous, precise language and recurring images that give an enigmatic cohesion to the whole.

[Yi-Sheng · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best volume of poetry I've read in quite some time. Carson revisits the same bizarre images over and over again in his alexandrine sonnets - kimonos, poppies, presidents, professors - but uses them to fold you into a brilliant kaleidescope of reflections on Irish history and identity.