First Language: Poems

Carson, Ciaran

ISBN 10: 0916390616 / ISBN 13: 9780916390617

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

About this Item

A Pristine, Collectible First Edition. ".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
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0916390616
• ISBN 13: 9780916390617
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

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."