Table of Contents

Restrictions on access

Special restrictions apply: Selected correspondence in Series 1 is closed except with the permission of the letter writer.

Terms Governing Use and Reproduction

All requests subject to limitations noted in departmental policies on reproduction. No special restrictions apply.

Related Materials in This Repository

Michael Longley papers, Peter Fallon/Gallery Press collection, and Medbh McGuckian papers.

Source

Purchase, 1993 with subsequent additions.

Citation

[identification of item(s)], Ciaran Carson papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

Biographical Note

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born in Belfast on 9 October 1948. He attended St. Mary's Christian Brothers' School in Belfast before going on to Queen's University, Belfast, where he graduated with honors in July 1971. In the final year of its gathering, 1971-1972, Carson participated in the Belfast group of poets and writers. This assemblage of young literary talents was organized originally by Philip Hobsbaum at Queens University, Belfast in 1963, but since 1966 it had met irregularly under the auspices of Seamus Heaney. After publishing poems in various newspapers and magazines, Carson's first chapbook The Insular Celts appeared in 1973. From 1974-1975 he taught school in Belfast; before joining the Arts Council of Northern Ireland as Traditional Arts Officer in 1976. In 1978, Carson received the Eric Gregory Award for his first book of poems, The New Estate. Three years later he published another chapbook The Lost Explorer (1979). Eight years then passed before Carson completed his next volume of poems, The Irish for No (1987), which received the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. Belfast Confetti (1989), a volume closely related to the 1987 collection, received a similar degree of critical success, winning the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for poetry.

During the supposed silence from 1979 to 1987, Carson continued writing poems and prose pieces including an Appletree Press guide book called Irish Traditional Music, published in 1986. A flutist himself, Carson returned ten years later to a more extensive examination of Irish music with the 1996 publication of the widely heralded Last Night's Fun: About Time, Food and Music. This book anticipates his next three prose works, which uniquely bend genre distinctions by blending memoir, history, and fiction. The art of story-telling continued to be a significant aspect of Carson's poetry as seen in First Language, a collection of poems awarded the first T. S. Eliot Prize for the outstanding book of poetry published in Great Britain in 1993. In this volume, Carson's interest in translation germinates into important translations from Ovid's Metamorphoses as well as poems written "after" Irish and French originals. 1996 saw the publication of Opera Et Cetera, which included an extensive sequence of translations from the Romanian of Stefan Augustin Doinas. Returning to his roots, The Star Factory, Carson's memoir and homage to the Belfast of his childhood followed in 1997.

Leaving the Arts Council in October 1998 to work as a full-time writer, Carson has emerged as one of the most prolific of major contemporary writers working in English. The translations continued in The Alexandrine Plan (1998), a book of adaptations of sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud. Then, in addition to the publication of The Ballad of HMS Belfast, a selection of Carson's Belfast poems, 1999 witnessed the release of two extraordinary volumes: The Twelfth of Never, Carson's own "Dream Songs," a book of 77 rollicking sonnets governed only by the iambic hexameter alexandrine, and Fishing for Amber. Exploring Ovid's Metamorphoses, as well as Irish fairy tales and stories of seventeenth-century Dutch painters, this book evinces a further evolution of Carson's inimitable genre-bending prose.

The Booker Prize-nominated Shamrock Tea, Carson's most recent "novel," was published in 2001, and continues Carson's maze-like narrative style of serendipity and interconnectedness as it opens up themes present in. Jan van Eyck's fifteenth-century painting The Arnolfini Marriage. His translation of Dante's Inferno was published in late-October 2002, to significant critical acclaim. This very important translation of Dante's vernacular Italian into Hiberno-English is a natural extension of Carson's decade-long exploration of rhyme and his lifetime fascination with the art of story-telling. A new book of poems and a "sequel" to Shamrock Tea are forthcoming.

Scope and Content Note

The collection consists of the personal and literary papers of Ciaran Carson from around 1970 to 2002. The papers include correspondence, literary notebooks, literary manuscripts, and collected printed material. The papers document Carson's creative career during these last two decades, though the bulk of the materials pertain to the 1990's. There are numerous drafts (in manuscript and typescript form) of his published poems and prose, as well as a significant number of unpublished poems. Whether for works of poetry or prose, from the notebooks to the extensive correspondence with editors and other literary interlocutors and readers to the final galley proofs, the collection offers detailed insight into Carson's creative processes. Of special note are early "group sheets" from Philip Hobsbaum's creative writing sessions in the early seventies in Series 5. Among the correspondents represented in the papers are the poets Peter Fallon, Tess Gallagher, Seamus Heaney, Medbh McGuckian, John Montague, and Frank Ormsby. Also, Carson's literary correspondence engages editors and scholars from around the world. There are also unpublished draft materials and published versions of creative and critical work sent to or collected by Carson. The printed material series (4) contains an extensive collection of reviews and other documents about Carson's published works. This series also contains a curious if extensive arrangement of Carson's performances and readings over the years. Several boxes contain Arts Council materials from largely the 1970's and 1980's. These documents, mostly of an administrative nature, pertain to Irish traditional music for the most part. Finally, the collection contains an assortment of photographs and other personal items.

Arrangement Note

Organized into ten series: (1) Correspondence, (2) Writings by Carson, (3) Writings by others, (4) Printed material by Carson and others, (5) Belfast Group worksheets, (6) Photographs, (7) Personal materials, (8) Subject files, (9) Arts Council of Northern Ireland records, and (10) Additions.

Finding Aid Note

An index to selected correspondents is available for the correspondence from the mid-1970s to 1999.

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Selected Search Terms

Personal Names

Fallon, Peter, 1951-

Gallagher, Tess.

Heaney, Seamus.

McGuckian, Medbh, 1950-

Montague, John.

Ormsby, Frank, 1947-

Prolux, Annie.

Robinson, Tim, 1935-

Corporate Names

Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Topical Terms

Arts, Irish.

English literature--Irish authors--20th century.

Irish poetry--20th century.

Poets, Irish--20th century.

Songs, Irish.

Belfast Group

Geographic Names

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

Northern Ireland.

Form/Genre Terms

Manuscripts.

Poems.

Occupation

Poet.