Carson - The Star Factory

An indispensable, genre-defying book.

Tom Adair, Irish Times

Wonderfully winning, both as a self-portrait and a portrait of the city.

Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement

Carson has written a maze-like autobiography of sorts It twists and weaves about like the most piquant of jazz solos Carsons Belfast is an almost dream-like location, a palimpsest of vanished and vanishing places.

Michael Glover, Independent on Sunday

The book Ive read and enjoyed most recently is The Star Factory by Ciaran Carson, who has dispensed with all the rules He has gone diving into a word-bath, a memory-bath, and come up with something really special.

Bernard McLaverty

If Seamus Heaney is the voice of rural Ulster, Ciaran Carson is the laureate of the urban North.

Terry Eagleton, New Statesman & Society

A book to re-read and savour.

Patricia Craig, Independent

You probably wont read anything as good this year.

Marie Claire

Carson possesses a wonderful gift not given to the ordinary mass of men. He can summon the freshest of colours from behind cobwebs.When he is gripped by some parenthetical thought or impulse, he casts off its brackets and lays it down in open, fluid integration.

Observer

What we are given here is autobiography in the present tense, a stream of consciousness and remembrance where the past is present in the act of writing. The result is wonderfully vivid and eclectic.

Glasgow Herald

Dazzlingly written, with verve, wit, and exacting powers of description and recall, its the highly unconventional autobiography of one of Northern Irelands very best poets.

Publishing News

An idiosyncratic, strange, mazy book to challenge notions of structural decorum, and offering the steps to a dance that, though wild enough, is in the end a critique of chaos.

Sebastian Barry, The Times

Carson is a poet and the language never ceases to delight, but most pleasing of all is the vision of Belfast that emerges, as personally recreated as Joyces Dublin.

Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times

Through autobiography, reportage and a feast of other elements, Carson presents the divided city as a metaphor for human uncertainty and hope, with the decaying landscape frequently a source of poetic beauty. The prose is often rapturously inventive.

New Scientist

What a stylist he is! An astoundingly rich book, leaping with love and scholarship.

Brian Case, Time Out

Ciaran Carsons The Star Factory is a collection of evocations and sketches of Belfast: not a social history, but a book of snapshots Every theme that might be a matter of lives and deaths is resolved in a photograph, a personality, an anecdote, an etymological diversion.

Denis Donoghue, London Review of Books

THE STAR FACTORY

The New Estate and Other Poems

Belfast Confetti

The Irish for No

The Twelfth of Never

First Language

Opera et Cetera

The Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music

Last Nights Fun

Inferno

THE
STAR
FACTORY

CIARAN CARSON

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 1997

This paperback edition published in 2019 by Apollo, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright 1997, Ciaran Carson

Ciaran Carson has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmissions of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (PBO): 9781838933654

ISBN (E): 9781838933661

Head of Zeus Ltd

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London EC1R 4RG

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I am grateful to Tess Gallagher for her many editorial suggestions

Im writing this the day after returning from Ciaran Carsons funeral in Belfast. He had a proper requiem mass, though he wasnt to my knowledge conventionally religious. It was led by an Indian priest, such is the state of Irish vocations, and was accompanied by traditional Irish music, for flute, voice, fiddle: Last Nights Fun, The Battle of Aughrim, The Mist Covered Mountain . The singer Pdraign n Uallachin sang a heartbreaking, acapella version of Uirchill na Chreagain , or Creggan Graveyard , a vision of a promised land written by a poet in 18th-century Armagh, then as now a place of tension and loss. At the end of the service Paul Muldoon read, conversationally and carefully, Frosts After Apple Picking.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

Muldoons quiet recitation spoke eloquently of friendship he had known Carson for over forty years and a shared commitment to an art they both had made their own.

The cremation took place five miles out on the east side of the city, with more formal ritual, including an entire decade of the rosary, which took me back to my childhood, kneeling miserably on hard linoleum through nightly recitals of the prayer cycle. But then the whole congregation sang the traditional Scottish ballad The Parting Glass and there werent many dry eyes in the bleak crematorium chapel:

But since it falls unto my lot that you should rise and I should not

Ill gently go and softly call, goodnight and joy be with you all.

All the music and the poetry had been chosen by Ciaran in the months before he died. In that time, after hed been told his lung cancer was terminal, and after a few fallow years, he wrote his last book in a sudden blaze of creativity. Still Life , a set of seventeen meditations on paintings, returns to the long lines and long forms of his great early collections Belfast Confetti and The Irish for No . His poetry publisher Peter Fallon delivered the finished book to his family just after Ciaran died. He had so wanted to read at the launch of the book, which he missed by ten days. At the end he was dreaming aloud, seeing writing on the walls. In those final months he met awkward expressions of sympathy with the words It is what it is.

That stoicism and knowledge that the end was coming permeates Still Lif e:

A line of blue hills is contoured like a monumental sentence.

Its beautiful weather, the 30th March, and tomorrow the clocks go forward.

How strange it is to be lying here listening to whatever it is is going on.

The days are getting longer now, however many of them I have left.

And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily outlast their end.

Peter Fallon, the proprietor, editor, designer, and manager of Gallery Books, who brings so many handsomely produced volumes of Irish poetry into the world, published Ciaran Carsons poetry for thirty-five years. I was the publisher of his prose for only ten.

If I can claim a footnote in literary history it may be that I cajoled Ciaran Carson into writing prose books. I had read The Irish for No at the recommendation of Colm Tibn (the name I drop was not then famous) and the opening lines were enough to make me feel Id been hit and woken up:

Horse Boyle was called Horse Boyle because of his brother Mule;