Collected Poems: Volume Two

Collected Poems: Volume Two demonstrates the range of Ciaran Carson’s later style, his fetch from the French of Jean Follain and his magnificent swansong, Still Life, a book of celebration and lamentation completed in the weeks before his untimely death.

Collected Poems: Volume One (published simply as Collected Poems in 2008 on the occasion of his 60th birthday) presents early poems and the books (The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti) that announced Ciaran Carson as an indispensable force in contemporary poetry. Subsequent collections, First Language, Opera Et Cetera, The Twelfth of Never, Breaking News and For All We Know confirmed his position as one of the great writers of our time.

From the neat shapes and thought of his earliest work, The New Estate, with its influence of Early Irish and Welsh nature notes, to the explosion of energy, inventiveness and verve in The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti; from the increasingly encyclopaedic range and formal dexterity of First Language and Opera Et Cetera to the sustained high pitch and wit of The Twelfth of Never; from the scalpelled precision of his biopsy of the causes and extent of war in Breaking News to the mysterious, moving and half-hinted narratives of For All We Know, his body of work, with its power surges and spikes, emerges as a triumph of style, strange fun and organic wholeness.