From There to Here

Ciaran Carson’s shape-changing genius shines across the volumes included in From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations. The explosive long lines of his earliest work move to the formal skill and inventive imagination of the middle period, while the concentrated stanzas and intellectual intensities of the volumes after the year 2000 continue his development. In recent years Carson’s renditions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations as well as his translations and responses to the French poet Jean Follain have added yet another dimension to his art and to the act of translation. It seems that with each volume Carson re-casts himself, much as Yeats did throughout his storied career. This selection takes us on an exceptional journey as the poet “initiates a constellation / from which blossom countless others.”

Born in 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ciaran Carson studied at Queen’s 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 Dante’s 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: “I’m not interested in ideologies . . . I’m 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.”