February 8, 2021
I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the example of Ciaran Carson, the Irish poet born in 1948, who wrote (like the rest of his generation from the North) in the immediate shadows of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, and who died in October 2019.
I got to know Ciaran just a bit in 2013 when I was on a Fulbright to the Seamus Heaney Centre, which Ciaran had come to direct after many years as a freelance journalist, prose writer, translator, and poet. He was wry and dry-humored and always impeccably dressed. (Word is he had an attic absolutely packed with three-piece suits.) He also played flute and tin-whistle at Madden’s Bar on Tuesday nights with his wife Deirdre and whoever else showed up for the evening’s “trad session” a casual, improvised collective playing (“performance” isn’t quite the right word) mostly turned inward toward the space the musicians were gathered around, rather than outward toward the bar’s patrons. I once asked him how