Excerpt from the Irish Times review of The Collected Poems of Ciaran Carson Vols 1&2: Innovative works by important Belfast-born poet’s writing was vast in its contemplation of time and mortality.
A complement and extension to Volume 1, The Collected Poems of Ciaran Carson Volume 2 gathers together four books of poems published by The Gallery Press since 2009. Where the first volume represents Carson’s oeuvre between his first collection, The New Estate (originally published by Blackstaff Press in 1976) and his eighth, For All We Know (2008), this second volume draws together further innovative and compelling works by this most important and dearly missed poet . . .
. . . Across Carson’s career, translation played a fundamental role. Everything is a kind of translation, he liked to say, between languages, between musicians, between history and the present. In the latter part of his work, though, it took on a new significance. From Elsewhere (2014) brings into English the French poet Jean Follain. What accompanies each fairly straight translation is what Carson calls in his preface “spins or takes on them”; “Translations of translations as it were”.
With these spins, we have then an evocation in poetic form of one of Carson’s most recognisable stylistic hinges, where something reminds him of something else; the deviations and detours by which stories hang together. With the translation of Sans le Language: Without Language, comes In Memory, a poem remembering Seamus Heaney: “As he told it / when the boy / he was stumbled / on the well / in the derelict brickyard / deep as a brick mill chimney”.
This inventiveness and facility with language; the inclination to think beyond the thing at hand is demonstrated with devastating elegance in Carson’s final masterpiece, Still Life, written in the months following his terminal diagnosis in 2019. The book abounds with poems about paintings: Monet and Angela Hackett, Velázquez and Jeffrey Morgan. “Never mind the death in the foreground, for months I’ve been pondering the miniature / figures in the distance”, he writes in Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648.
The Collected Poems Volumes 1 and 2 represent Carson’s monumental contribution to poetry in Ireland and internationally. These are poems of enduring brilliance, passionate about the world, sensate and curious, dissonant, and euphonious. These are indispensable books by an essential poet.
— Stephen Sexton, The Irish Times
