First Language: Poems

Carson, Ciaran

ISBN 10: 0916390616 / ISBN 13: 9780916390617

Published by Wake Forest University Press, Winston-Salem, NC, 1994

About this Item

".First Language is a spectacular collection.If you buy only one poetry book.this year, make sure it's this one."--Gerald Dawe, The Irish Times Winner of the first T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize for outstanding British/Irish poetry. Seller Inventory # 001145

Bibliographic Details

Title: First Language: Poems

Publisher: Wake Forest University Press, Winston-Salem, NC

Publication Date: 1994

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

Edition: First Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Ciaran Carson won the first-ever T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize for First Language

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.”