The New Estate

by Ciaran Carson

Carson's earliest work. Embraces traditional subjects and treatments, translations from Early Irish and Welsh, and a number of more contemporary themes.

Genres: Poetry

71 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Maddie Margioni · Rating 4 out of 5]

not my favorite poems from the period but i liked the historical parallels he was drawing

[Differengenera · Rating 3 out of 5]

volume of 50 odd poems from the seventies.

A lot of it is very descriptive, and has that quality you see in some Instagram poetry where it comes off very immediate and sensory, and as though the author has struck a few line breaks in a piece originally put together in prose. a few poems are descriptions of photographs and even this choice of subject will tell you a lot about what Carson's after: childhood, memory, domestic interiors, those Proustian details condensed out of meaning in the unconscious for years. This gives the impression of an interest in a kind of poetic miniature or objets d'art; the adequacy of a preference for form over experience is litigated a few times too, in about half of them tasks such as weaving, manual labour imply that life is the process of negotiating the gap. this is fine but also makes them a bit breathy and reverential.

When we do abstract out we go cosmic rather than, as Heaney or some of his contemporaries might, to the classics or to Irish myth; a vision of the stars, framed by something working at a more human scale rounds out a lot of these.

[scarlettraces · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5)

[Ida Boardman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An underrated Carson collection

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't grabbed by this as much as by the ambitious gamesmanship of Carson's later poetry, but there are inklings and spots of a reserved but striking intelligence here.