From There to Here

Ciaran Carson's shape-changing genius shines across the volumes included in From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations. The explosive long lines of his earliest work move to the formal skill and inventive imagination of the middle period, while the concentrated stanzas and intellectual intensities of the volumes after the year 2000 continue his development. In recent years Carson's renditions of Rimbaud's Illuminations as well as his translations and responses to the French poet Jean Follain have added yet another dimension to his art and to the act of translation. It seems that with each volume Carson re-casts himself, much as Yeats did throughout his storied career. This selection takes us on an exceptional journey as the poet “initiates a constellation / from which blossom countless others.”