Until Before After

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. Until Before After is separated into three sections (until, before, after) and each poem in each section includes a relevant preposition from the title of that section. Like its companion volume, Until Before After reflects on a period of illness in the family. With these brief philosophical excursions, Carson rivals Beckett in his efforts to show how the contemporary artist must struggle to chart the flux of experience, no matter how heartfelt are its terms.

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), Belfast 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.

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 Aosdana 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.”