Until Before After

by Ciaran Carson

Following the publication of Collected Poems, and the critically acclaimed For All We Know, Ciaran Carson has produced in just over one short but powerfully felt year two extraordinary volumes of poetry, Until Before After and On the Night Watch. Until Before After is separated into three sections (until, before, after) and each poem in each section includes a relevant preposition from the title of that section. Like its companion volume, Until Before After reflects on a period of illness in the family. With these brief philosophical excursions, Carson rivals Beckett in his efforts to show how the contemporary artist must struggle to chart the flux of experience, no matter how heartfelt are its terms.

Genres: Poetry

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

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

[Joanne Merriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fortunate to see the author read from this book in April 2011. He started the reading by playing on a tin flute (he’s also a musician and an expert on Irish music), which was a lovely way to ease into his devastating poems.

Ciarán Carson is a poet from Belfast who I think is chiefly famous for writing about the troubles there, but my favourite poetry of his is this stuff about his wife's hospital stay for a serious illness. The book is tremendous – very minimal, stripped down - stripped raw, really. It's not always easy to read, but so worth it.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solemnly blatant. Plainly good. 157 unpunctuated sentence-poems, each poem holding maybe three jarring, run-on thoughts. It's melancholy, about loss, time and rhythm, but present itself as neither pitiful nor gnostic. It's really difficult to parse, but you don't resent that. There's a shout-out to China Miéville in the back, which is mad! because these poems are stylistically nothing like Miéville's clotted, neologistic prose. There are maybe 2 words less than a hundred years old in the whole book ("credit card"). Closer inspection.