Page 5 - Ciaran Carson News Today

Martin Doyle on growing up in a Northern Ireland shrouded in bigotry and violence

Sara Backer Windows I‒V “Everything we look at is conditioned by the eye of memory.”—Ciaran Carson Blackshaw’s windows are the upright rectangles of my childhood. The bottom panes push up for air. A latch in the middle locks shut. Opening or closing requires a strong shove. A shade pulls down with a lifesaver loop, which swings until settled. I’m back in my first bedroom—I could draw a map of it to this day. A window on each exterior wall, my bed in the windowless corner. One win...

Research project ‘These children are people like us’: agency, belonging and the ethics of representing displaced children in the work of Beverley Naidoo This project is the outcome of a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Seven Stories: the National Centre for Children’s Books. Children’s literature has the potential to both contribute to and provide a powerful counternarrative to dehumanising popular discourses about displaced people. A writer of children’s fiction, depicting dis...

Glyn Maxwell, Alan Gillis, Ben Wilkinson on poetic voice, formal prowess, and strange times . . . Paul Farley took the pulse at the turn of our millennium when he quipped that contemporary poets haven’t had criticism, they’ve had marketing. In an age where marketing’s role in matters aesthetic is ever-increasing, the individual voice can be an overvalued commodity, playing to a perceived appetite for poet-as-author. It is refreshing, then, to encounter Glyn Maxwell’s How the Hell Are...

Iggy had an ‘infectious passion for music’ Posted: 9:05 am March 4, 2021 By Jodie Curran THE death has taken place of a Tempo father who had an “infectious passion for music” and a “lust for life” after a brave battle with cancer. Iggy Murphy (44) of Ballyreagh, was widely known for his talents both on and off the stage. A dedicated member of the Cavanacarragh band and players, Mr Murphy was no stranger to the local music scene, having performed with a number of popular ban...

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-hum...

Graffiti walking tour of Belfast reveals world class street art gracing walls in the most unexpected places We took a walking tour of the artwork to find out the meanings behind some very impressive pieces The video will auto-play soon8Cancel Play now Never miss a thing from Belfast and beyond - sign up for FREE newsletter direct to your inboxInvalid EmailSomething went wrong, please try again later. Subscribe When you subscribe we will use the information you provide to send you these newslett...

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka (Bloomsbury) The Nobel laureate’s first novel in almost 50 years promises “murder, mayhem and no shortage of drama” in contemporary Nigeria. The Thursday Murder Club 2 by Richard Osman (Viking) Last year the Pointless co-host’s cosy crime debut set in a retirement home broke sales records; here comes the sequel. Waters of Salvation by Richard Coles (W&N) A new crime series from everyone’s favourite vicar begins ...

Published posthumously, the last of three Dante translations reveals Gray’s powers of insight and invention A detail from Hell, the first volume in Gray’s trilogy. Photograph: Alasdair Gray/Hell A detail from Hell, the first volume in Gray’s trilogy. Photograph: Alasdair Gray/Hell Thu 24 Dec 2020 02.30 EST Alasdair Gray, the great Scottish novelist and artist, died a year ago, in December 2019. In his biography of Gray, Biography (2008) – the closest thing we have to a cont...

  Not the least of our losses in this plague year was one of our greatest poets, Derek Mahon. Washing Up (Gallery Press) is a glorious late harvest - vigorous, funny, angry, blithe - beautifully produced, like all Gallery editions, and including, appropriately, a lovely tribute to another luminary of the dead poets society, Ciaran Carson. Mahons last is vividly alive. Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters, edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten (Thames & Hudson) is a ju...