These are by no means the only places online where one may find poems written by Ciaran Carson, but it’s a start. First, the “official” pages:
- His Academy Of American Poets page (yes, I know he’s Irish, but I’m still glad he’s present there, since he’s not on the Poetry Foundation site) feature four poems: the anaphoric “Fear,” the condensed lines of “Home” and “Let Us Go Then,” and the imagery of violet in “The Assignation.”
- His Poetry Archive page also has four poems with (unfortunately low-volume) audio readings: “Belfast Confetti,” the first poem of his I’ve read and still among my favorites, the imagery of white this time in “Snow,” the cute “Catmint Tea,” and “Fear” again.
Carson has translated Irish epic poems, from the traditional heroics of The Táin to the erotic farce of The Midnight Court, as well as Dante‘s Inferno. He has also “adapted” sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarme in The Alexandrine Plan (and used the same Alexandrine line for his own book-lengh sonnet sequence The Twelfth of Never). It seems appropriate then for his work to be translated as well in:
- a Spanish-language essay on “the quotidian violence” in Carson’s work that contain the English texts and Spanish translations of “Belfast Confetti,” “Night Out,” “Campaign,” and “Ambition”
- an Italian-language essay on Carson’s “poetic maps and stories of Belfast” that feature the English texts and Italian translations of “Turn Again,” “Loaf,” “Punctuation,” the celebrated “Dresden” (as well as, once again, “Belfast Confetti” and “Campaign”), “Smithfield Market,” “Travellers,” and “Slate Street School”
- “Through” from The New Yorker
- “Second Time Round” in The Guardian
Finally, two other sources:
- a discussion thread on The Blue Dragon has two moving poems of love and potential loss: “Pas De Deux” and “The Story of Madame Chevalier”
- an unpublished personal anthology of favorite poems from 2000 B.C. to 2000 A.D. include three poems by Carson: “Bagpipe Music,” “Dresden” once again, and “Hamlet.”