First Language
by Ciaran Carson
Summary
First Language was the first book ever to win the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the choice set the award's standard: a collection in which nothing, least of all the words themselves, can be taken for granted. Ciaran Carson grew up in Belfast in an Irish speaking household inside an English speaking city, and this book makes that condition its subject; language itself, learned, lost, translated, and weaponized, is what the poems are about. Around his own poems Carson sets translations and versions of Ovid, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, not as garnish but as argument, the whole book insisting that every tongue is somebody's first and somebody's foreign. The instrument is his famous long line, a rangy, headlong measure that lets a poem digress like a Belfast storyteller, double back, take up an etymology, and land somewhere the opening never promised; readers who know his earlier books The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti will recognize the swerving city walking method, here turned from mapping the Troubles' streets to mapping the words the Troubles were conducted in. Carson was also a traditional musician, a flute player who spent years as the Arts Council's traditional arts officer, and the music shows: the poems have the reel's momentum and the session's love of variation. Reading him is dizzying in the way good talk is dizzying, erudition worn as play with something deadly serious underneath. He went on to found the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University and to publish celebrated versions of Dante and the Táin, but the first Eliot Prize stayed his; the award began here.
Historical Context & Significance
The Poetry Book Society created the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1993 for its own fortieth anniversary, naming it for the Society's founding spirit, and awarding the first one to a Belfast poet writing about the politics of language, in the last years before the ceasefires, announced the prize's seriousness at a stroke. Carson belonged to the extraordinary Northern Irish generation around Heaney, Longley, and Muldoon, and the prize's early lists are thick with them. He kept faith with both his arts, publishing Last Night's Fun, a prose book about traditional music, a few years later, and by his death in 2019 he was recognized as one of Ireland's essential poets, the one for whom the dictionary itself was home ground, and the Seamus Heaney Centre he built has trained a generation of successors.