First Language: Poems
Ciaran Carson's early collection begins from voices that move between Irish and English and uses that tension to explore the texture of language itself. Wit and technical control expand the bilingual pressure of the poems.
Work Information
Carson's starting point, where the boundary between languages becomes the material of the poem.
Ciaran Carson's early signature collection takes the relation between Irish and English, translation, and sound as its point of departure. It stretches land and memory into a movement of language.
Review Summaries
-
Readers often point to the opening Irish-language poem and the book's shifting relation to translation as part of its appeal. Some find the vocabulary dense, but the collection is usually valued as an inventive experiment in language.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Wake Forest Univ Pr
- Published
- 1994-05-01
- Pages
- 77 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.61 x 0.76 x 22.23 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780916390600
- ISBN-10
- 0916390608
- Price
- 1761 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry
Ciaran Carson won the first-ever T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize for First Language
Born in 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ciaran Carson studied at Queens University, Belfast, where, from 2003?2015, he served as the director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Though recently retired from that post, he continues to teach a postgraduate poetry workshop there, in addition to overseeing the Belfast Writers Group. Earlier in his career (from 1975?1998), Ciaran Carson acted as an arts officer for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He is also a member of Aosdána and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. A writer of both poetry and prose?fiction and non-fiction alike?Ciaran Carson has also translated many texts, including The Midnight Court, a work of the eighteenth-century poet Brian Merriman, and a version of Dantes The Inferno, which won the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. His other awards include the first-ever T. S. Eliot Prize (1994, for First Language), and the Forward Prize for Best Collection (2003, for Breaking News). As well as being a significant poet and careful translator, Carson is also a scholar of traditional Irish music; he frequently plays the flute alongside his wife, the accomplished Irish fiddler Deirdre Shannon. He has said: ?Im not interested in ideologies . . . Im interested in the words, and how they sound to me, how words connect with experience, of fear, of anxiety . . . Your only responsibility is to the language.
Reviews
-
An excellent collection from one of Ireland's finest writers[imho]. A sure replacement [in the continuing canon of Irish Poetry] for Seamus Heaney RIP.
Related Literary Awards
- T. S. Eliot Prize Edition 1 (1993) ・Winner