Poetry Review: Ciaran Carson

By Sibhéal McGarry

Ciaran Carson was born on the 9th of October 1948 in Belfast. In his formative years he lived in the Falls Road and attended the local school St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ Grammar School.

He would go on to obtain his English degree from Queen’s University Belfast and would return to become the professor of English Language in 1998.

Carson was a fluent Irish speaker and wrote in his poem ‘The Other’: ‘I write in English, but the ghost of Irish hovers behind it’. This shows the influence of language on his poetry. Many of his translated works would receive awards such as the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his translation of Dante’s Inferno.

He would write 9 volumes of poetry and 4 books of prose in his lifetime. Carson would also go on to win many awards for his pieces including the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection for Breaking News in 2003.

‘The Fetch’ from Carson’s ‘For All We Know’ is a melancholic poem detailing the grief that arises from loss.

The poem begins with a vivid scene of the narrator lying in bed with their spouse. Their spouse’s hair is ‘fanned out over the downy pillow’. An intimate image of them twined in bed with one another is evoked and this creates a sense of safety and comfort.

The narrator then describes a dream he had of them standing on a distant shore. His spouse tells him that she must return ‘back to where it all began’. The ambiguousness of the phrase leaves the narrator confused.

The spouse begins to almost speak in enigmas, for example she says, ‘Knit one, purl two’. Later the narrator says, ‘Your eyes met mine’. The spouse understands the narrator’s confusion by their words and is attempting to convey an unspoken message, one that he still cannot decode.

The spouse vanishes in the current and the narrator poignantly says, ‘I lay there and thought how glad I was to find you again’. The sadness of this simple line connotes the narrator’s joy at having discovered them again only to finally wake and realise that they are not there.

You can read the ‘The Fetch’ at The Fetch by Ciaran Carson | Poetry Foundation

Photo credits: https://inside.wfu.edu/2015/10/poet-ciaran-carson-to-give-campus-reading-nov-4/

Edited by Tiffany Murnaghan