Wonderful tribute to ‘laureate of the Troubles’
Poet, musician, mentor, teacher and translator — Ciaran Carson was a man of many parts, writes Edward McCann
BACK in the early 1980s, Seamus Heaney was on his way along Dame Street to speak at Trinity College Dublin. He was in the company of fellow poets Ciaran Carson and Michael Longley. A window cleaner scrambled down his ladder from five storeys up at the old Northern Bank building and praised Carson for a music event he had attended on the north coast, which had been organised by Carson.
When he saw Heaney, he said: “You’re the poet, aren’t you?” Heaney said that yes indeed he was. In response the window cleaner, perhaps seeing Heaney’s talents as being wasted, said: “Would you ever turn out an oul’ tune?”
Heaney may have been the greatest poet of his generation but he wasn’t a musician. Carson, who along with Heaney was one of the famed Belfast group of poets, was not just a musician but a superlative poet and “laureate of the Troubles”. These many aspects of his talents were captured at an event in the Lyric Theatre in Belfast last week.
Carson, who died in October at the age of 70, is rightly famed for poems such as Belfast Confetti. But he was more than that. The great and the good of Belfast’s literary scene gathered to pay tribute to the poet, musician, Gaeilgoir, mentor, teacher and translator.
The civic reception was an eclectic affair with beautifully crafted poetry readings interspersed with traditional music and stories recalling Carson’s unique talent and sense of humour. The event was organised by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast and the Irish Government Secretariat.
The tributes came from those who knew him, including writers Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Frank Ormsby, Sinead Morrissey and brother Liam. Also in attendance were Carson’s wife Deirdre Shannon and three children Manus, Gerard and Mary.
As well as Carson’s contemporaries, young poets such as Manuela Moser represented the new generation taught by Carson. And there was a political presence — Claire Hanna of the SDLP who took time out of the campaign trail for the closely contested parliamentary seat of South Belfast.
Carson, born in west Belfast in 1948, was brought up in an Irish-speaking family and later went on to work for the Arts Council before becoming the head of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.
He published his first collection of poetry, The New Estate, in 1976. He would go on to publish 14 collections of poems, five prose books and celebrated translations of Dante’s Inferno, for which he was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the saga, Tain Bo Cuailnge.
The event had its moments of humour. Frank Ormsby struggled to read in the bright stage lights and at one stage abandoned his reading to recall Carson’s prodigious language skills and how he had translated Dante’s Inferno to much acclaim… even though he didn’t speak Italian.
To much laughter, Ormsby illustrated how the gritty and sometimes prosaic Belfast can have a grounding effect on even the most lauded of poets. He remembered how Carson had been lionised in Italy and basking in the glow on his return to his native city went for a walk in the Waterworks in the north of the city. There he was accosted by some adolescents who called him a “specky c***”.
Longley recalled Carson’s ire at being cast as The Rabbit in his poem of the same name. It followed a somewhat surreal trip to Poland involving at different stages a rabbit and two prostitutes in a hotel bar. In response, Carson had said he would call Longley ‘The Mole’.
Throughout the evening, writer Glenn Patterson was mercurial as MC, even joking at one stage that his green velvet suit had been loaned to him by Peter Pan (the Christmas show is running at the moment in the Lyric).
Singer Len Graham recalled how Carson was the arts officer for traditional music in Ireland north or south and had excelled in the role, giving him a leg up.
A particular highlight of the evening was a musical rendition of Carson’s The Star Factory by harpist Una Monaghan, who grew up in the same area of Andersonstown as Carson. Monaghan had also been taught by Carson and it was a fitting tribute, fusing music and words, just as Carson himself had done throughout his illustrious career.