On the Night Watch

Following the publication of Collected Poems, and the critically acclaimed For All We Know, Ciaran Carson has produced in just over one short but powerfully felt year two extraordinary volumes of poetry, Until Before After and On the Nightwatch. Like its companion volume, On the Nightwatch moves within the tight emotional spaces of worry and waiting that characterize a period of illness in the family, creating an echo-chamber in the short-lined sonnets of this volume. The intricate and yet spare allegory of these poems details the arduous ways in which we try to cope with life's hardships.

With this sequence of tiny, haunting poems Carson---venturesome as ever---may be wanting us less to read in the conventional sense than "to watch//what never seems/to alter" as you run frame after frame of a film reel through your fingers. The Sunday Times (London)

Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 and raised in Belfast, where he still lives. Educated at The Queen's University, Belfast, he was appointed Chair of Poetry at its Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in 2003. Carson is a traditional musician, a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, a prose-writer, a translator, as well as a poet. His critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, published in North America by Wake Forest University Press, include The New Estate (1976), The Irish For No (1987), Bel-fast Confetti (1989), First Language (1994), Opera Et Cetera (1996), The Alexandrine Plan (1998), The Twelfth of Never (1998), Selected Poems (2001), Breaking News (2003), For all we Know (2008), and Collected Poems (2009).

Among his many prizes, Carson was awarded the first ever T.S. Eliot Prize for the outstanding book of poetry published in Great Britain (First Language), the prestigious Forward Prize for best collection of poetry (Breaking News), and the Butler Literary Award for Poetry by the Irish American Cultural Institute in 2000. His version of Dante's Inferno (2002) was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Carson has also published The Midnight Court (2006), a rollicking translation of Brian Merriman's eighteenth century Irish poem, as well as the Ulster saga, The Tain (2008). Prose books include Last Night's Fun, about traditional Irish music; The Star Factory, a personal history of Belfast; the magical Fishing for Amber; the strange and hallucinogenic Shamrock Tea; and most recently, The Pen Friend.