The New Estate

By Ciarán Carson b. 1948 Ciaran Carson

Forget the corncrake’s elegy. Rusty

Iambics that escaped your discipline

Of shorn lawns, it is sustained by nature.

It does not grieve for you, nor for itself.

You remember the rolled gold of cornfields,

Their rustling of tinsel in the wind,

A whole field quivering like blown silk?

A shiver now runs through the laurel hedge,

And washing flutters like the swaying lines

Of a new verse. The high fidelity

Music of the newly-wed obscures your

Dedication to a life of loving

Money. What could they be for, those marble

Toilet fixtures, the silence of water-beds,

That book of poems you bought yesterday?

Source: Selected Poems (Wake Forest University Press, 2001)

Biography

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, into an Irish-speaking family, poet Ciarán Carson attended Queen’s University, Belfast. He held the position of traditional arts officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998 and was appointed director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University in 2003. Carson is the author of a number of collections of poetry, including The Irish for No (1987), winner of . . .

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