Kirjahaku

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.

‘I write to try to see you as you were, or what you have become. You left no forwarding address: that was part of your intention. For when we wrote those letters to each other all those years ago, we wrote as much for ourselves as for each other.’ More than twenty years after the end of their love affair, Gabriel receives a cryptic postcard from old flame Nina. It is the first of thirteen cards from her, each one provoking a series of reveries about their life together in 1980s Belfast. The Pen Friend is, however, much more than a love story. As Gabriel teases out the significance of the cards, his reveries develop into richly textured meditations on writing, memory, spiritualism and surveillance. The result is an intricate web of fact and fiction – moving easily between such varied subjects as the Troubles, Esperanto and John Lavery – a strange and wonderful novel by one of our finest Irish writers. If you enjoyed The Pen Friend, you might also enjoy Ciaran Carson’s Exchange Place, a brilliant thriller set in Paris and Belfast.

"Last Night's Fun's" is a sparking celebration of music and life that is itself a literary performance of the highest order. Carson's inspired jumble of recording history, poetry, tall tales, and polemic captures the sound and vigor of a ruthlessly unsentimental music. "Last Night's Fun" is remarkable for its liveliness, honesty, scholarship, and spontaneous joy; certainly there has never been a book about Irish music like this one, and few books ever written anywhere about the experience of music can compare with it.

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 uses--constructive and destructive--of the building rubble of Belfast history. Rich in lore of place, these innovative and vividly fresh poems draw deeply on traditions--oral, local, and literary.

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

'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.

One of Ireland's most celebrated writers, musicians, and poets, Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast and has spent his life there. In The Star Factory, he makes himself the cartographer of his home city's spaces, symbolic and literal, the scribe of its byways and avenues, from Abbey Road to Zetland Street. Belfast has seen transformation: once the fifth-greatest industrial city in the world, the home of the S.S. Titanic, it has more recently been a battleground of sectarian slaughter. To conjure up the lives lived there, Carson plunges down the 'wormhole of memory' – admiring along the way the strata and roots beneath the surface. Though it has experienced more than its share of urban decay – the Star Factory of the title is an abandoned mill – Carson's Belfast teems with stories, stories that can spring from a telephone directory, a cigarette case, a postcard, a book about tramways, a stamp. For the eye that knows where to look, and the ear that can listen, gems and melodies are everywhere. The Star Factory is an elegy of magical power and enduring love, a work of passion and precision, and sure to be considered one of the finest books about Ireland ever written.

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.