Turn Again
There is a map of the city which shows the bridge that was never built.A map which shows the bridge that collapsed; the streets that never existed.Ireland's Entry, Elbow Lane, Weigh-House Lane, Back Lane, Stone-Cutter's Entry —Today's plan is already yesterday's — the streets that were there are gone.And the shape of the jails cannot be shown for security reasons.The linen backing is falling apart — the Falls Road hangs by a thread.When someone asks me where I live, I remember where I used to live.Someone asks me for directions, and I think again. I turn intoA side street to try to throw off my shadow, and history is changed.
Feature Date
- October 23, 2019
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Susan Tichy
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Copyright © 2018 by Ciaran Carson
All rights reserved.
from From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations (2018)
by Ciaran Carson
Reproduced by kind permission of the author’s Estate c/o The Gallery Press
Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast. He worked in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998, with responsibility for Traditional Music, and, more latterly, Literature.
In October 2003, he was appointed Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast.
He is the author of fourteen collections of poems, including The Irish for No, Belfast Confetti, The Twelfth of Never, First Language, Opera Et Cetera, The New Estate and Other Poems (1988), Breaking News, (Forward Prize), For All We Know (Poetry Book Society Choice; shortlisted for 2008 T.S. Eliot prize), Collected Poems (2008), On the Night Watch (2009) and Until Before After (2010). His translations include The Alexandrine Plan, The Midnight Court, The Inferno of Dante Aligheri, The Táin, In the Light Of (2012) and From Elsewhere (October 2014). From There to Here (Selected Poems and Translations) was published on the occasion of his 70th birthday (October 2018) and Still Life in October 2019.
He won several literary awards, including the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His translation of Dante’s Inferno (2002) was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and in 2003 he was made an honorary member of the Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association. He was also a member of Aosdána and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Carson passed away on October 6, 2019.
Oldcastle, County Meath
Ireland
Ciaran Carson’s Collected Poems, one of the outstanding books of our time, has been followed by four collections of original poems and translations. This new selection, From There to Here, demonstrates the myriad facets of his virtuosity. It is a retrospective of an artist’s work that is characterized at every stage by formal, linguistic and imaginative opulence. Bookended by previously unpublished translations from Irish, the meticulousness of its choices and arrangement reveals and emphasizes, in echoes and mirror images, an essential integrity.
"From his dazzling, astonishingly inventive translations to his own poems and prose, Ciaran Carson continues to demonstrate what it means to have ears that truly work. He is one of the best poets on either side of the Atlantic and the publication of every one of his books is a major event in our literatures."
—Charles Simic
"Ciaran Carson’s selected poems and translations, From There To Here, compresses a brilliant career into 200 pages. His exhilarating long-lined narrative poems, classics like The Irish for No, Belfast Confetti and Calvin Klein’s Obsession, are followed by tight, firecracker sonnets and an extract from the virtuoso long-lined sonnet sequence For All We Know. Such a range would be enough for any poet, but the last quarter of the book foregrounds poems of unsettling bareness, stripped of the idiomatic rhythms of which he was such a master. These haunted, haunting fragments glitter as much as anything else this shapeshifting genius has written."
— John McAuliffe, The Irish Times (The Best Poetry of 2018)
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