Ciaran Carson

Carson resided in Belfast for all of his life. He died of lung cancer on 6 October 2019 at the age of 70.

The Ballad of HMS Belfast (1999) collected his Belfast poems.

After graduation, he worked for over twenty years as the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 1998 he was appointed a Professor of English at QUB where he established, and was the Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. He retired in 2016 but remained attached to the organisation on a part-time basis. In 2020, the Seamus Heaney Centre established two, annual Fellowships in memory of its first director, Ciaran Carson, and inspired by his writing about the city of Belfast in prose as well as poetry.

He was also an accomplished musician, and the author of Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music (1996), a study of Irish traditional music. He wrote a bi-monthly column on traditional Irish music for The Journal of Music. In 2007 his translation of the early Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, called The Táin, was published by Penguin Classics.

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 form the Romanian poet Ștefan 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 published The Twelfth of Never (1999), sonnets on fanciful themes:

In First Language (1993), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize, language has become the subject. There are translations of Ovid, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Carson was deeply influenced by Louis 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 music Last Night's Fun (1996) is regarded as a classic). To be precise, the rhythm is that of a "single jig" or "slide."):

His collections of poetry include The Irish for No (1987), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize; Belfast Confetti (1990), which won the Irish Times' Irish Literature Prize for Poetry; and First Language: Poems (1993), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. His prose includes The Star Factory (1997) and Fishing for Amber (1999). His novel Shamrock Tea (2001), explores themes present in Jan van Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Marriage. His translation of Dante's Inferno was published in November 2002. Breaking News, (2003), won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and a Cholmondeley Award. His translation of Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court came out in 2006. For All We Know was published in 2008, and his Collected Poems were published in Ireland in 2008, and in North America in 2009.

Carson managed an unusual marriage in his work between the Irish vernacular story-telling tradition and the witty elusive mock-pedantic scholarship of Paul Muldoon. (Muldoon also combines both modes). In a trivial sense, what differentiates them is line length. As Carol Rumens pointed out 'Before the 1987 publication of The Irish for No, Carson was a quiet, solid worker in the groves of Heaney. But at that point he rebelled into language, set free by a rangy "long line" that was attributed variously to the influence of C. K. Williams, Louis MacNeice and traditional music'.

Carson's first book was The New Estate (1976). In the ten years before The Irish for No (1987) he perfected a new style which effected a unique fusion of traditional story telling with postmodernist devices. The first poem in The Irish for No, the tour-de-force 'Dresden' parades his new technique. Free ranging allusion is the key. The poem begins in shabby bucolic:

Ciaran Gerard Carson (9 October 1948 – 6 October 2019) was a Northern Ireland-born poet and novelist.

Two months before he died he published Claude Monet, "The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil", 1880 in The New Yorker. Its last lines were: