Ciaran Carson

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

Its last lines were:

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.

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

Ciaran Carson was born on 9 October 1948 in Belfast into an Irish-speaking family.

His father, William, was a postman and his mother, Mary, worked in the linen mills.

He spent his early years in the lower Falls Road where he attended Slate Street School and then St. Gall's Primary School, both of which subsequently closed.

He then attended St. Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School before proceeding to Queen's University, Belfast (QUB) to read for a degree in English.

After graduation, he worked for over twenty years as the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Carson's first book was The New Estate (1976).

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.

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'.

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:

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 of The 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 as the Troubles themselves.

The poem "Belfast Confetti" signals this:

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'.

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.

His prose includes The Star Factory (1997) and Fishing for Amber (1999).

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.

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.

In 2007 his translation of the early Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, called The Táin, was published by Penguin Classics.

For All We Know was published in 2008, and his Collected Poems were published in Ireland in 2008, and in North America in 2009.

He retired in 2016 but remained attached to the organisation on a part-time basis.