For All We Know - Softcover

Carson, Ciaran

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1930630387 ISBN 13: 9781930630383

Publisher: Wake Forest University Press, 2008

Synopsis

In Ciaran Carson’s For All We Know, politics and psychology, history and love blend in a subtle, potent mix that recognizes how “the lie is memorized, the truth is remembered.” It is a pas de deux of two lovers, of the very poems themselves, that moves between personal attraction and betrayal against memories of the Troubles and other historical events (the 60s, the Second World War). This mysterious book of dialogues evokes Paris, Dresden and other European cities, while citing Cold War thrillers, fairy stories, popular music, and the art of the fugue. Ciaran Carson is one of the most versatile and imaginative contemporary poets writing in English. For All We Know is a virtuoso display of his powers.

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.”

Reviews

Starred Review. A contemporary of Paul Muldoon, Carson is one of the most well-known poets of his generation in the U.K. He is too little known here, though this ambitious new book may change that. Borrowing its structure in part from the repetitions and variations of the musical fugue, this collection enacts the ways the past, present and future are interwoven, as objects in hand—a watch, a pen, a dress—evoke memories of people and places—Paris, Berlin, Dresden—of the past. The poems—sets of long-lined couplets divided into two sections, so that each poem has a twin with the same title, for a total of 75 poems—follow a pair of lovers, one from Paris, the other from Northern Ireland, whose romance comes to a tragic end, having passed through the Irish Troubles (We were sequestered in The Crown after the explosion) and intrigues elsewhere in Europe (You gave me to understand in a manner of speaking/ that you'd some longstanding unfinished business in Nevers). As the voices in the poems—and the poems themselves—talk to each other, Carson dissolves the borders between one time and another, between the personal and the historical, seeking and evading the truth always with the awareness that The lie is memorized, the truth is remembered. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1930630387
• ISBN 13: 9781930630383
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 116