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Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on October 9, 1948, Ciaran Carson learned English while playing in the streets. He attended Queen's University, Belfast not long after Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon, and received his degree in English.
Carson has published several collections of poetry. His U.S. publications include Belfast Confetti (1989), First Language (1994), Opera Et Cetera (1996), The Alexandrine Plan (1998), The Twelfth of Never (1998), Breaking News (2003), The Midnight Court (2006), For All We Know (2008), and the recent On the Night Watch (2010), all published by Wake Forest University Press.
In addition, Carson has written four books of prose: Last Night's Fun, The Star Factory, Fishing for Amber: A Long Story, and Shamrock Tea, a novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Carson has also been recognized for his work in translation. His translation of Dante's Inferno (2002) was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and, in 2003, he was made an honorary member of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association.
Carson has received several awards including the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, the Forward Poetry Prize and a Cholmondeley Award.
Since 1998, he has been a professor of English at Queen's University. He founded the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at the University in 2003.
hurtling from the airport down the mountain road past barbed wire snagged with plastic bags fields of scrap and thistle farmyards from the edge of the plateau my eye zooms into the clarity of Belfast streets shipyards domes theatres British Army helicopter poised motionless at last I see everything
I think I must have told him my name was Juliette, with four syllables, you said, to go with violette. I envisaged the violet air that presages snow, the dark campaniles of a city beginning to blur a malfunctioning violet neon pharmacy sign jittering away all night through the dimity curtains. Near dawn you opened them to a deep fall and discovered a line of solitary footprints leading to a porch: a smell of candle-wax and frankincense; the dim murmur of a liturgy you knew but whose language you did not. The statues were shrouded in Lenten violet, save one, a Virgin in a cope of voile so white as to be blue. As was the custom there, your host informed you afterwards— the church was dedicated to Our Lady of the Snows.
through the trip wired minefield hand in hand eyes for nothing but ourselves alone undaunted by the traps & pits of wasted land until you stoop & pluck a stem of eyebright
