Synopsis
Informed in part by Irish ballad metre and its criss-cross assonances, these poems contemplate the structure of authority and language. Opera Et Cetera comprises four sequences including ‘Letters from the Alphabet’ and ‘Opera’ which is based on the radio operator’s code. As distorting mirrors of each other, they question the way we tell stories all the time. Rhyme itself fuels these experiments in narrative. ‘Et Cetera’ reinvigorates the vocabulary of Latin tags, while, ‘Alibi’ consists of versions from the Romanian of Stefan Augustin Doinas, whose investigations of powers-that-be find parallels in contemporary Ireland. In its obsessive musical sweep, the book is a tour de force. It is also, sometimes, very funny.
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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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