Kevin Young on Ciaran Carson’s 'Hopeful, Final Lines'

We were sad to learn Irish poet Ciaran Carson passed at the age of 70; posting earlier about it in these pages. In a remembrance published at the New Yorker, Kevin Young recalls Carson's life and words. He writes, "The news of the death of the poet Ciaran Carson seems all the more sorrowful because it was not unexpected. After a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, last spring, he knew that he was dying, and, thus, those who knew him did, too—but can one ever prepare?" From there: 

If anything, death focussed Carson, bringing a burst of poems that seemed to know that they were his last—and, also, knew how to last. The ones I’ve seen (the magazine recently published two of them) looked not so much at the inevitable as at the surprises along the way. These final poems, which riff off of other works of art, will appear in a book, “Still Life,” from Ireland’s revered The Gallery Press, later this month. Finished in a season, the poems will be released in another, which Carson will not see the end of. He was seventy years old.

I’ve known Carson’s work since his groundbreaking “Belfast Confetti,” which was published in 1989. I still have the Gallery Press edition. I was in London after graduating from college, having used some prize money to travel, and was struck by the active poetry readership there—poems were in the newspapers and in the air, and they guided me to Carson’s work. His poems were wild and all their own, though they wrestled with the rich Irish legacy of poets—he was part of the Belfast Group—and with the Troubles still echoing. Carson saw the violence in terms of language:

Suddenly as the riot squad moved in it was raining exclamation marks,
Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion
Itself—an asterisk on the map.

In a short statement, his longtime publisher, Peter Fallon, said that it was “not an exaggeration to compare his mapping of Belfast with Joyce’s of Dublin.”

Read more at the New Yorker.