Poet Ciaran Carson, who "grew up in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast" and "went on to transfigure his native city, and transfix his readers, with a rich accumulation of poems, metafictions and other unclassifiable prose works, the most recent of which, Exchange Place (2012), was lauded for its elegance and precision," died October 6, the Guardian reported. He was 70.
His poetry books include Belfast Confetti (1989), Last Night's Fun (1996), The New Estate (1976), First Language (1993); Opera Et Cetera (1996) and The Twelfth of Never (1998). Nonfiction works include Fishing for Amber (1999), Shamrock Tea (2001), The Pen Friend (2009), and The Star Factory (1997). Still Life, a new collection of poems, will be published this month.
Carson "had Belfast lore and topography at his fingertips, but he superimposed a psychic overlay on the city's mundane streets and terraces, its feuds and factions, the aggravations and atrocities of the bloody 30-year Troubles," the Guardian wrote.
Asked by the Irish Times earlier this year to nominate his current favorite book, poet Paul Muldoon chose Carson's From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations (2018), praising his "ability to find connections in so many aspects of the world."
Among his many honors were the T.S. Eliot prize, the Irish Times Irish literature prize, the Cholmondeley award, the Forward prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation prize.
His publisher, Peter Fallon of the Gallery Press, said Carson's work was "heroic" and that it was "not an exaggeration to compare his mapping of Belfast with Joyce's of Dublin.... We plan to publish Still Life on October 16--and we will, with pride and the heaviest heart. But, oh, what fun we had!"
The Guardian noted that Carson's first action on receiving his cancer diagnosis was to embark on a series of poems, "ostensibly about paintings (by Poussin, Canaletto and Thomas Jones, among others), but also celebrating his life with [his wife] Deirdre in a particular part of north Belfast, and of the area itself."
In Still Life, the upcoming collection, when Carson's poem "Letters from the Alphabet" reaches "Z," it culminates in a two-line stanza: "In the morning you will open up the envelope. You will get whatever/ Message is inside. It is for all time. Its postmark is The Twelfth of Never."