First Language

by Ciaran Carson

Ciaran Carson won the first-ever T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize for First Language

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Irish Literature

77 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

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

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

First Language was the inaugural winner of the T S Eliot Prize in 1993. He was born in Belfast to an Irish speaking family and the first poem in this collection is untranslated Irish. This is like a statement of intent. What that intent is I don't think I entirely know, but perhaps to put his mark on the language that wasn't his first?

I find it hard to review this book. I don't feel qualified. It is such a display of verbal dexterity, of ideas and sounds. I had to reach for the dictionary more often than I usually do, which is not a bad thing btw. I get great joy in learning a new word because you never know when you might want to use it in action.

Three of the poems are takes on stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses. There are other poems after various poets. It's almost as if Carson is whacking together a Irish story-telling tradition and an academic verbosity to create something joyful.

I read this back and wonder if I know what I'm talking about.

I know that I relished the language I was reading. I relished Carson's experimentation. If it was experimentation.

I sometimes wish I had a better academic education when it comes to understanding poetry, but I don't. All I can do is say whether I enjoyed something or not and - to the best of my ability explain why.

I feel I've failed here.

But read it. Some of you might like it.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

a superflexible collection Carson anNOUNces his brain to the world and won the inaugural Eliot prize. Lots of talent lots of balladry here I'll get more of him going soon. A little along the lines of if i liked paul muldoon which is to say the PM Joycean aspiration but better achieved from where I'm standing. And honestly what a move to open with a poem in Irish, presented without translation. the deal is real

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stylistically Carson has a repetitive use of the long poetic line. The nature of a ‘first language’ first comes up in the first poem, written in Gaelic, and more complicated by an abundance of translations, questioning: in which language Carson’s firstly poetic one lies.

[Mandy Haggith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much linguistic fireworks for my liking, without a clear sense of where it was going. I much, much preferred his Dante translation, where the old genius provided the story and Carson's fabulous language dressed it up nicely.