Opera Et Cetera - Hardcover

Carson, Ciaran

4.09

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Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0916390764 ISBN 13: 9780916390761

Publisher: Wake Forest University Press, 1996

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Torqueing and tuning his long lines to the demands of rhyme, Carson skitters from Northern Ireland to Romania to the twin volcanoesBalalaika, Karaoke, from the Irish language to the Latin roots of English. In the opening series of alphabet poems, Carson turns the synchronic ABC s into isolable histories, miniature mysteries that, in sequence, compose a sinister, narrative trajectory, one that may not arrive at an ending, or that may conclude by questioning its beginnings. Meaning itself may fail in its delivery, as the final poem of the sequence suggests: In the morning you open up the envelope. You will get whatever / Message is inside. It is for all time. Its postmark is The Twelfth of Never (Z ). Words and stories proliferate, exuberantly and often hilariously, as Carson makes play of the work that is Opera. "

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About the Author:

Born in 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ciaran Carson studied at Queen s University, Belfast, where, from 20032015, 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 19751998), Ciaran Carson acted as an arts officer for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He is also a member of Aosdana and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. A writer of both poetry and prosefiction and non-fiction alikeCiaran 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. "

From the Back Cover:

Opera et cetera: Torqueing and tuning his long lines in this new volume to the demands of rhyme, Carson skitters from Northern Ireland to Romania to the "twin volcanoes - Balalaika, Karaoke", from the Irish language to the Latin roots of English. In the opening series of alphabet poems, Carson turns the synchronic ABC's into isolable histories, miniature mysteries that, in sequence, compose a sinister, narrative trajectory, one that may not arrive at an ending, or that may conclude by questioning its beginnings.

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