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“... Quarter we found Red Hand Commando masks and combat uniforms laid neatly in the attic along with some bomb-making literature and a token cache of weeping gelignite like their men had just gone off to mutilate their hand-guns with shipyard angle-grinders and we had taken them at their word for what it is worth which is to say that peace comes when t ...”

“... You were telling me a story of your great-grandmother’s over a bottle of Burgundy by a bubbling fire. Deep in the Forest of Language there dwelt a manikin not called Rumpelstiltskin. His name was not that important. One day a riderless mare trotted to a halt at his door. The manikin brought her to stable and fed her some hay. He was surprised when the mare upped and spoke in the King’s French ...”

“... I Fatima handed out twelve teaching modules of the ‘empathy belly’ To the variously expectant fathers. Some were Paddy, and some were Billy. Today’s lesson was the concept ‘Orange’. They parsed it into segments: some were kith, And some were kin. They spat out the pips and learned to peel the pith. Then the deep grammar of the handshake, the shibboleths of aitch and haitch: It’s a bit like tying knots, whether Gordian or sheepshank, clove or hitch ...”

“... after Francis Ponge Orange As for the sponge, so for the orange: the aspiration to regain face after being wrung into expression. However, the sponge succeeds always, the orange never, segments burst, its inner being squeezed to mush. Only the peel springs, albeit flabbily and slowly, back into shape; and yes, the consequential amber juice is fragrant, cool and sweet, but then too often comes the bitter matter of the unexpected pips you have to spit ...”

“... As usual, the clock in the Clock Bar was a good few minutes fast, A fiction no one really bothered to maintain, unlike the story The comrade on my left was telling, which no one knew for certain truth: Back in 1922, a sergeant, I forget his name, was shot outside the National Bank ... Ah yes, what year was it that they knocked it down? Yet, its memory’s as fresh As the inky smell of new pound notes – which interferes with the beer-and-whiskey Tang of now, like two dogs meeting in the revolutionary 69 of a long sniff, Or cattle jostling shit-stained flanks in the Pound ...”

“... caught the vigour of his language at the cost of its variety. Before this new translation by Ciaran Carson, perhaps only Peter Whigham, whose version was left unfinished at his death, managed to re-create in English the full orchestra of Dante’s tongues, his ‘strange locust-like phonetics’ (to borrow the extraordinary vocabulary of Osip ...”

“... by nature and on principle. But I’m a Dublin man by avocation, though not by right of birth. Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory is a collection of evocations and sketches of Belfast: not a social history, but a book of snapshots. Several of its chapters describe scenes well known to me in kind but not in particular. The book consists of ...”

“... This is Ciaran Carson’s second collection of poems. His first, The New Estate (1976), revealed an intricate, lyrical poet intensely aware of traditional Irish cultures, and concerned to connect them meaningfully with the sprawl of modern living; these early poems are taut, rather literary, and often very beautiful ...”

“... Pater remarks of ‘Lady Lisa’ that she is ‘older than the rocks among which she sits’; Ciaran Carson (Fishing for Amber, 1999) feels that the 17th-century Dutch walls in Vermeer’s paintings are ‘as old as Egypt’. As a man Vermeer is little more to us than a signature. There is virtually no evidence for his artistic training, his ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... If you want robots, Astroturf and IT you should turn to the younger Ulster poets Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson.The difference, however, lies less in their subject-matter than in the sensibility associated with it. Next to their channel-hopping transitions, macaronic language games and subversions of cultural piety, Heaney often seems like a creature ...”

“... not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite view, most vehement among them Ciaran Carson in The Honest Ulsterman. ‘It is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened; they happened then, they happen now, and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution’, he wrote: ‘It is ...”

“... less exalted. Its subject is Hare Bowl (2008), a small oil painting by Jeffrey Morgan, owned by Ciaran and Deirdre Carson. Ciaran Carson’s poem about it, which starts in mid-flow, was written in the last months of his life.His gift revealed itself – a little book-sized still ...”

“... Jack, and on through periodicals and poetry from Sean O’Faolain to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Ciaran Carson. The readings are tuned to the local, tracking water into the land along inlets and loughs, but there is a sense of the planetary and the political, especially the aftermath of empire, because the waters have taken people so far and create ...”

“... Protestants, even in the Republic. Then my old schoolfriend Ernie comes in with his friend Ciaran – they wave at the others and join us. Ernie is fascinated by cars and soon shifts the talk in that direction. ‘I see you’ve given up on the Toyota,’ he says. ‘How many miles had she on the clock?’ I tell him the car was so battered and ancient ...”