Ciaran Carson | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1948-10-09)9 October 1948 |
| Died | 6 October 2019(2019-10-06) (aged 70) Belfast, Northern Ireland |
| Education | St. Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School, Belfast Queen's University, Belfast |
| Notable awards | Eric Gregory Award (1978) Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (1987) T. S. Eliot Prize (1993) Cholmondeley Award (2003) Forward Poetry Prize (2003) |
Ciaran Gerard Carson (Irish:Ciarán Gearóid Mac Carráin; 9 October 1948 – 6 October 2019) was aNorthern Ireland-born poet and novelist.
Ciaran Carson was born on 9 October 1948 inBelfast into anIrish-speaking family.[1] His father, William, was a postman and his mother, Mary, worked in the linen mills. He spent his early years in the lowerFalls Road where he attended Slate Street School and thenSt Gall's Primary School, both of which subsequently closed. He then attendedSt Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School before proceeding toQueen's University Belfast (QUB) to read for a degree in English.[2] He died in Belfast on 6 October 2019.
After graduation, he worked for over twenty years as the Traditional Arts Officer of theArts Council of Northern Ireland.[3]
In 1998 he was appointed a Professor of English at QUB where he established and was the Director of theSeamus Heaney Centre.[3]
He retired in 2016 but remained attached to the organisation on a part-time basis.[4]
His collections of poetry includeThe Irish for No (1987), winner of theAlice Hunt Bartlett Prize;Belfast Confetti (1990), which won theIrish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry; andFirst Language: Poems (1993), winner of theT. S. Eliot Prize. His prose includesThe Star Factory (1997) andFishing for Amber (1999). His novelShamrock Tea (2001), explores themes present inJan van Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Marriage. His translation ofDante'sInferno was published in November 2002.Breaking News, (2003), won theForward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and aCholmondeley Award.[3] His translation ofBrian Merriman'sThe Midnight Court came out in 2006.For All We Know was published in 2008, and hisCollected Poems were published in Ireland in 2008, and in North America in 2009.[5]
He was also an accomplished musician, and the author ofLast Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music (1996), a study of Irish traditional music.[3] He wrote a bi-monthly column on traditional Irish music forThe Journal of Music. In 2007 his translation of the early Irish epicTáin Bó Cúailnge, calledThe Táin, was published by Penguin Classics.[6]
Two months before he died he publishedClaude Monet, "The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil", 1880 inThe New Yorker. Its last lines were:[7]
Carson managed an unusual marriage in his work between the Irish vernacular story-telling tradition and the witty elusive mock-pedantic scholarship ofPaul Muldoon[3] (Muldoon also combines both modes). In a trivial sense, what differentiates them is line length. As Carol Rumens pointed out 'Before the 1987 publication ofThe Irish for No, Carson was a quiet, solid worker in the groves ofHeaney. But at that point, he rebelled into language, set free by a rangy "long line" that was attributed variously to the influence ofC. K. Williams,Louis MacNeice and traditional music'.
Carson's first book wasThe New Estate (1976).[8] In the ten years beforeThe Irish for No (1987) he perfected a new style which effected a unique fusion of traditional storytelling with postmodernist devices. The first poem inThe Irish for No, the tour-de-force 'Dresden' parades his new technique. Free-ranging allusion is the key. The poem begins in shabby bucolic:
It takes five pages to get to Dresden, the protagonist having joined the RAF as an escape from rural and then urban poverty. In Carson everything is rooted in the everyday, so the destruction of Dresden evokes memories of a particular Dresden shepherdess he had on the mantelpiece as a child and the destruction is described in terms of 'an avalanche of porcelain, sluicing and cascading'.
Like Muldoon's, Carson's work was intensely allusive. In much of his poetry, he had a project of sociological scope: to evoke Belfast in encyclopaedic detail. Part Two ofThe Irish for No was called 'Belfast Confetti' and this idea expanded to become his next book. The Belfast of the Troubles is mapped with obsessive precision and the language of the Troubles is as powerful a presence asthe Troubles themselves. The poem "Belfast Confetti" signals this:
InFirst Language (1993), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize, language has become the subject. There are translations ofOvid,Rimbaud andBaudelaire. Carson was deeply influenced byLouis MacNeice and he included a poem called 'Bagpipe Music'. What it owes to the original is its rhythmic verve. With his love of dense long lines, it is not surprising he was drawn to classical poetry and Baudelaire. In fact, the rhythm of 'Bagpipe Music' seems to be that of an Irish jig, on which subject he was an expert (his book about Irish musicLast Night's Fun (1996) is regarded as a classic).[citation needed] To be precise, the rhythm is that of a "single jig" or "slide."):
'blah dithery dump a doodle scattery idle fortunoodle.'
Carson then entered a prolific phase in which the concern for language liberated him into a new creativity.Opera Etcetera (1996) had a set of poems on letters of the alphabet and another series on Latin tags such as 'Solvitur Ambulando' and 'Quod Erat Demonstrandum' and another series of translations from the Romanian poetȘtefan Augustin Doinaș. Translation became a key concern,The Alexandrine Plan (1998) featured sonnets by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé rendered into Alexandrines. Carson's penchant for the long line found a perfect focus in the 12-syllable alexandrine line. He also publishedThe Twelfth of Never (1999), sonnets on fanciful themes:
The Ballad of HMS Belfast (1999) collected his Belfast poems.
Carson died oflung cancer on 6 October 2019 at the age of 70.[9][10]
In 2020, the Seamus Heaney Centre established two annualfellowships in memory of its first director, Ciaran Carson, and inspired by his writing about the city of Belfast in prose as well as poetry.[11]
