Ciaran Carson mêle avec maestria sa connaissance intime de sa ville natale de Belfast aux traditions de l'Irlande rurale et à la langue irlandaise. Son écriture explore souvent le paysage complexe de la ville et de ses habitants, s'appuyant sur son expérience de musicien et d'érudit de la tradition orale irlandaise. Le style de Carson est reconnu pour sa riche texture et sa musicalité, qui reflètent ses propres talents de flûtiste et de chanteur. Son œuvre plonge dans l'histoire, la langue et l'identité culturelle, offrant aux lecteurs une perspective unique sur l'expérience irlandaise.
Last Night's Fun's is a sparking celebration of music and life that is itself a literary performance of the highest order. Carson's inspired jumble of recording history, poetry, tall tales, and polemic captures the sound and vigor of a ruthlessly unsentimental music. Last Night's Fun is remarkable for its liveliness, honesty, scholarship, and spontaneous joy; certainly there has never been a book about Irish music like this one, and few books ever written anywhere about the experience of music can compare with it.
In Still Life, Ciaran Carson guides us through centuries of art and around the Belfast Waterworks where he walks with his wife, Deirdre; into the chemo ward; into memory and the allusive quicksilver of his mind, always bidding us to look carefully at the details of a painter's canvas, as well as the sunlight of day. This master translator chooses here to translate the painter's brush with the poet's pen, finding resemblances, echoes, and parallels. A thorn becomes the nib of a writer's pencil and the pointed pipette of a chemo drip entering the poet's vein. Yet, Deirdre stands as much in the center of these poems as do the paintings. At times, the two seem to escape into the paintings themselves: "Standing by the high farmstead in the upper left of the picture--there!--in a patch of / sunlight. ... They could be us, out for a walk." Balancing the desire to escape into the stillness and permanence of art with the insistent yearning to be fully present in each moment, Carson reminds us--"Look! ... There!"--that in the midst of illness, even in the face of death, there is, still, life.
'From Elsewhere' features translations from the French poet Jean Follain faced by 'original' poems inspired by those translations: spins and takes on them, in other words.
More than twenty years after the end of their love affair, Gabriel receives
thirteen postcards from old flame Nina, each one provoking memories about
their life together in 1980s Belfast and reveries on subjects such as the
Troubles, his father, Esperanto and fountain pens.
Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast and has spent his life there. In this
memoir, he makes himself the cartographer of his home city's spaces, symbolic
and literal, the scribe of its byways and avenues.
Belfast Confetti, Ciaran Carson’s third book of poetry, weaves together in a carefully sequenced volume prose pieces, long poems, lyrics, and haiku. His subjects include the permeable boundaries of Belfast neighborhoods, of memory, of public and private fear, and, indeed, of the forms of language and art. Carson finds unexpected uses—constructive and destructive—of the building rubble of Belfast history. Rich in lore of place, these innovative and vividly fresh poems draw deeply on traditions—oral, local, and literary.
`Exchange Place is gloriously uncategorisable. Robbe-Grillet would have
welcomed it ... Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler too would have tipped
the brims of their trilbys in salute. A wonderful intellectual romp.' John
Banville
От издателя Магическая субстанция позволяет героям "Чая из трилистника" проникнуть внутрь знаменитой картины Яна ван Эйка "Двойной портрет Арнольфини", и они обретают способность с предельной ясностью воспринимать окружающее. Хитросплетения сюжета и многослойность тематики (средневековая цветовая символика, жития святых, судьбы Ирландии) превращают повествование в замысловатое кружево. Все связано со всем, и весь мир можно увидеть в капле воды - как считал Артур Конан Доил, который также является одним из героев этой удивительной и волшебной книги. Киаран Карсон (р. 1948) - североирландский писатель, автор нескольких стихотворных сборников, лауреат ряда литературных премий. Роман "Чай из трилистника" был включен в лонг-лист премии Букера 2001 года.
