Ciaran Carson

Presents a mythic tale of the legendary warrior, Cu Châulainn, and his battle against the invading army of Connacht over the fabled Brown Bull of Cooley.

The Tain

Dante Alighieri

This is a truly original retelling of Dante's epic journey that will surprise and renew the 21st-century reader's faith in the art of translation. Remarkably inventive, Ciaran Carson's Inferno deserves comparison with Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid.

A New Translation

The Inferno of Dante Alighieri

Belfast Confetti

A new translation of the eighth-century Irish epic, Táin Bó Cúailnge, is a sprawling mythic tale of the legendary warrior, Cu Chúlainn, and his battle against the invading army of Connacht over the fabled Brown Bull of Cooley. 15,00 first printing.

A New Translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge

The Táin

In Still Life, Ciaran Carson guides us through centuries of art and around the Belfast Waterworks where he walks with his wife, Deirdre; into the chemo ward; into memory and the allusive quicksilver of his mind, always bidding us to look carefully at the details of a painter's canvas, as well as the sunlight of day. This master translator chooses here to translate the painter's brush with the poet's pen, finding resemblances, echoes, and parallels. A thorn becomes the nib of a writer's pencil and the pointed pipette of a chemo drip entering the poet's vein. Yet, Deirdre stands as much in the center of these poems as do the paintings. At times, the two seem to escape into the paintings themselves: "Standing by the high farmstead in the upper left of the picture--there!--in a patch of / sunlight. ... They could be us, out for a walk." Balancing the desire to escape into the stillness and permanence of art with the insistent yearning to be fully present in each moment, Carson reminds us--"Look! ... There!"--that in the midst of illness, even in the face of death, there is, still, life.

Still Life

Brian Merriman

Master poet, storyteller and translator Ciaran Carson has great fun with this eighteenth-century erotic masterpiece, which deals with the topic of repression, sexual and otherwise. The Midnight Court has been called one of the greatest comic works of literature, and certainly the greatest comic poem ever written in Ireland. --Seán Ó TuamaThe story is an aisling--a Gaelic literary genre, in which a poet wanders and meets a beautiful fairy woman who is ultimately identified as Ireland herself, prophesying the return of her power--but this is an aisling stood on its head. As Carson explains: Merriman subverted all that. His fairy woman is not beautiful, but a threatening monster. The vision that she discloses is not of a future paradise, but a present reality ... The protagonists of the 'Court, ' including 'Merriman' himself, are ghosts, summoned into being by language; they are figments of the imagination. In the 'Court' the language itself is continually interrogated and Merriman is the great illusionist, continually spiriting words into another dimension. --Wake Forest University Press.

A New Translation of "Cúirt an Mheán Oíche"

The Midnight Court

The author describes his childhood growing up in Belfast, and looks at how the city has changed from its more prosperous and peaceful past

The Star Factory

The Irish for No

Few poets can alter readers' orientation as radically as does Ciaran Carson. In Breaking News, this former master of the long line employs two- and three-syllable lines to alter tempo, the time of his narrative, and the distinction between separate wars and eras. The imperial past, which haunts Belfast in its Crimean place-names, its violence, and its scissorblade meeting of different cultures, bleeds into the present. In many of these poems Carson brings into a visual and tactile present of smell and sound and taste radical revisions of paintings, other poems, and bulletins of a war correspondent "to accommodate rhyme and rhythm," as he says in his notes, or to post, as Pound says of poetry, the "news that stays news." Winner of the 2003 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection.

Breaking News

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 Nightwatch. 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. Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 and raised in Belfast, where he still lives. Educated at The Queen's University, Belfast, he was appointed Chair of Poetry at its Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in 2003. Carson is a traditional musician, a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, a prose-writer, a translator, as well as a poet. His critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, published in North America by Wake Forest University Press, include The New Estate (1976), The Irish For No (1987), Belfast Confetti (1989), First Language (1994), Opera Et Cetera (1996), The Alexandrine Plan (1998), The Twelfth of Never (1998), Selected Poems (2001), Breaking News (2003), For All We Know (2008), and Collected Poems (2009). Among his many prizes, Carson was awarded the first-ever T.S. Eliot Prize for the outstanding book of poetry published in Great Britain (First Language), the prestigious Forward Prize for best collection of poetry (Breaking News), and the Butler Literary Award for Poetry by the Irish American Cultural Institute in 2000. His version of Dante's Inferno (2002) was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize Carson has also published The Midnight Court (2006), a rollicking translation of Brian Merriman's eighteenth-century Irish poem, as well as the Ulster saga, The Tain (2008). Prose books include Last Night's Fun, about traditional Irish music; The Star Factory, a personal history of Belfast; the magical Fishing for Amber; the strange and hallucinogenic Shamrock Tea; and most recently, The Pen Friend.

Until Before After

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2001, this is the brilliant new novel from the author of Fishing For Amber. A heady brew, both as a book and as a drink. Carson writes like a poet, who can weave and bind his words together with such rhythm that his prose seems to slide off the page (Spectator).

Shamrock Tea

This compendium, made from Ciaran Carson’s previous collections, reveals one of the most remarkable and sustained tours de force in contemporary poetry: the poet’s reimaginign of his native city of Belfast. Carson introduces the reader to a city as full of surreal narrative and imaginative possibility as Borges’ Buenos Aires or Calvino’s Venice; at the same time he never shirks from taking a hard look at the city in all its political and cultural complexity. In its refusal to simplify or romanticize, The Ballad of HMS Belfast is an indispensable guidebook to a city few will know exists. ‘He is the master of the long line; these poems are manic, frightening and funny, and somehow manage to catch the tone of life in modern Belfast’ John Banville, Irish Times ‘It is about Belfast past and present and is full of surprises, savage and witty, human and extravagant. His voice is truly original, both intelligent and passionate’ A. S. Byatt, Sunday Times Books of the Year

A Compendium of Belfast Poems

The Ballad of HMS Belfast

More than twenty years after the end of their love affair, Gabriel receives a series of cryptic postcards from his old flame. Inspired to write his own letter, Gabriel dwells in sensuous detail on perfumes, clothes, and conversations as he tries to recapture the spirit of their romance in 1980s Belfast. As Gabriel teases out the significance of the postcards, the layers of meaning in the images and messages, his reveries develop into richly textured meditations on writing, memory, spiritualism, and surveillance. The result is an elaborate and intricate web of fact and fiction, a narrative that marries sharp historical insights with imaginative exuberance, a strange and wonderful novel confirming Ciaran Carson as one of Ireland's most exciting writers.

The Pen Friend

Presents a collection of parallel poems written as recollections of conversations between lovers.

For All We Know

Arts Council of Northern Ireland

A Fusillade of Question-Marks

Belfast is a city that seems eternally scarred by the jagged, confusing lines of its sectarian map, but Ciaran Carson remembers and invents the city in which he grew up as a fractured, haunted urban labyrinth. It contains the city of his childhood, of a dying industrialism.

'Quite simply the best version of Dante there is' PAUL MULDOON, Irish Times. Almost eight centuries after its first publication, Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy remains an icon of Italian literature and of the epic genre. In Inferno, the first volume, the poet Virgil leads Dante's hero through hell, showing him the inhabitants of each of its nine circles and examples of the divine justice meted out to them. In this beautifully produced Apollo Library edition, Ciaran Carson's translation suffuses the text with wit, anger and irreverent vigour, without diminishing the pathos of the original. This is a retelling of Dante's epic journey for the twenty-first-century reader.

The Inferno

A selection of all that is great about Carson's poems: his translations of Ovid, his Irish ballads, poems about identity and a sense of place.

Belfast Confetti, Ciaran Carson s third book of poetry, weaves together in a carefully sequenced volume prose pieces, long poems, lyrics, and haiku. His subjects include the permeable boundaries of Belfast neighborhoods, of memory, of public and private fear, and, indeed, of the forms of language and art. Carson finds unexpected usesconstructive and destructiveof the building rubble of Belfast history. Rich in lore of place, these innovative and vividly fresh poems draw deeply on traditionsoral, local, and literary."

Ciaran Carson is among the most restlessly groundbreaking poets now writing in English. In From Elsewhere, he adds yet another dimension to his poetry and to the act of translation by combining them in homage to the French poet Jean Follain (19031971). Carson not only translates the original, but also adds his own poetic rendition, crafting a mosaic of translation and free response. The implications of Follain s poems are often made arrestingly explicit in Carson s versions. The silences in Without Language resound as the unfathomable echoes of In Memory. The terror of Modernism in The Burnt Island becomes the modern terrorism of Timing Device. When we arrive at Without Courage / Translation at the beginning of the third part, the poetic flight from Follain to Carson is comprehensive, though changed in the meantime / that is elsewhere. We understand the title intimately as a conversation between poets across time and space."

Ciaran Carson

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