Collected Poems | Ciaran Carson

by Ciaran Carson, Peter Fallon (Editor)

Ciaran Carson’s Collected Poems gathers work from eight collections. From the formal and thematic traditions of his earlierst work, The New Estate (1976), the energetic long lines of The Irish for No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989), to the formal adroitness of Opera Et Cetera (1996), The Alexandrine Plan (1998) and The Twelfth of Never (1998), Carson has shown himself to be an extraordinarily adaptable poet. In Breaking News (2003), this master of the long line employs two- and three-syllable lines to alter the tempo, the time of his narrative, and the distinction between separate wars and eras. Carson’s 2008 volume For All We Know is a pas de deux of personal attraction and betrayal set against the memories of the Troubles as well as against other previous historical events (the 60s in Paris, the Second World War). It seems that with each volume Carson invents anew the very ground from which his poetry springs. Collected Poems ensures the poet’s place at the cutting edge of contemporary art.

Genres: Poetry, Irish Literature

600 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

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

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unless you’re a Nobel Prize winner, there’s something crudely even cruelly indulgent about a 587-page collection of poems by one author. Since it had the weight of a cinder block, I used my edition to prop open an ocean-facing door. But it's being there constantly caused me to pick it up more than once, and I found myself 400 pages in and captivated by an intoxicating mix of styles. Carson variously invokes history, the present, opium, nationalism, Omega watches, blue blouses, Japanese miniaturism, Bloody Marys, Greek gods, blood, Moscow campaigns, or as he puts it, "of maidens soldiers presidents and plants I've sung of fairies fishes horses and of headless men."

This is a poetry with the quality of myth -- simple resonant things you've already heard and uncannily know, but leavened with enough humor and self-deprecation to make it easily swallowed. There’s a brilliant poem apparently inspired by a war correspondent called Gallipoli that admits in glorious uglinesses our inability to comprehend war. The many gorgeous unfamiliar words whether invented or ancient only underlined Carson’s invention. The poems show occasional brilliance, frequent cleverness, and tight restraint. A great collection. And while this is far more spare than the average Carson poem, it is nonetheless an emblematic sample:

The knife
Glitters

As she slits
Fish

Guts slithering
Into a

Zinc bucket

More drink
The soldiers cry

Warts blaze
On the faces

Of the serving men

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a handsome, comprehensive edition of Carson's poetry, starting with the impressive poems of_The New Estate_ (now out of print in the U.S.) and ending with the fugue-like sequence _For All We Know_. Wake Forest University Press was founded in the 1970s as a North American outlet for Irish poetry, and from the beginning Carson has been one of the press's stars; it's no surprise that it would produce such an attractive volume to mark the poet's entry into his sixties.

Carson's own poetry has long been closely related to his work in poetic translation, and the boundaries between the two have sometimes blurred: some of his poems have included translations of Japanese haiku, for instance, and poems offered as translations of 19th-century French poets have included some daring liberties that amount to rewrites. Nevertheless, this _Collected Poems_ asserts a firm distinction between poems that are (mostly) his own and poems that are (mostly) translations, as it includes the former and excludes the latter.

[Valissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Walls have ears: the shadows you throw are the shadows you try to throw off...
My thumb is the hammer of a gun. The thumb goes up. The thumb goes down."