For All We Know - Softcover

Ciaran Carson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852354399 ISBN 13: 9781852354398

Publisher: The Gallery Press, 2008

Synopsis

This novelistic sequence traces a love story, its repercussions and reprises unfolding what happened or what might have ben in Belfast, Paris and Dresden.

About this title

About the Author

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.”

Review

Poetry Magazine: "The book, you might even say, is its own nonce form: the abba of a mysterious, and mysteriously moving, chiastic experiment. What happens, happens again, and the mesmerizing roteness pushes the poems halfway to allegory, and, at times, all the way to brilliant. For All We Know is an intelligence operation in the truest sense." --Carmine Starnino, Poetry Magazine

Boston Review: "Carson's latest collection synthesizes the arc of a long career and may be the best introduction for those encountering it for the first time [...] The result is an extraordinary and intentional reflection on identity, time, history, loss, and language" --Piotr Florczyk, Boston Review

Yale Review: "In For All We Know memory itself resembles a kind of fugue, and each act of remembering rings a change on our lived experience of a past that remains [...] It is the extraordinary combination of lyricism and storytelling in which Carson captures this idea that makes me want, having finished the book, to return to it perpetually." --Wes Davis, The Yale Review

Daring, high-spirited, and... mouthy... Carson's ability to make grittily rich music out of local speech... revealed a powerhouse ear paired with a down-at-heel sensibility... For All We Know is an intelligence operation in the truest sense. --Carmine Starnino, Poetry Magazine

Yale Review: "In For All We Know memory itself resembles a kind of fugue, and each act of remembering rings a change on our lived experience of a past that remains [...] It is the extraordinary combination of lyricism and storytelling in which Carson captures this idea that makes me want, having finished the book, to return to it perpetually." --Wes Davis, The Yale Review

Edition details

• Publisher: The Gallery Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852354399
• ISBN 13: 9781852354398
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 113