The Globe and Mail - 16.10.2019

WEDNESDAY,OCTOBER16,2019| THE GLOBE AND MAILO B21

C

iaran Carson, whose poetry and
prose captured the pungency,
tensions and rich heritage of
Northern Ireland, especially his
native Belfast, died in the city on Oct. 6.
He was 70.
Laura Susijn of the Susijn Agency,
which represented him, said the cause
was lung cancer.
Mr. Carson was perhaps best known as
a poet, and his most acclaimed collection
may have beenBelfast Confetti, published
in 1989.
“Carson’s lanky verses and prose
poems have made poetry out of the scary
complexities of the distraught city,”
Thomas D’Evelyn wrote of that volume in
The Christian Science Monitor. Its title
poem begins with a jarring collision of
imagery:

Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was
raining exclamation marks,
Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken
type. And the explosion
Itself – an asterisk on the map. This hyphe-
nated line, a burst of rapid fire ...
I was trying to complete a sentence in my
head, but it kept stuttering.
All the alleyways and side-streets blocked
with stops and colons.

He experimented with structure, and his
style evolved, from longer lines to short-
er, fragmented ones.
“I can’t say why the forms in which I
write have changed so radically over the
years,” he told the Wake Forest University
Press in 2010, “but it seems we should
adopt new methods for new situations.
The situation demands the form.”
His exploratory nature also infused a
wide variety of prose works. There was
the mosaic-likeShamrock Tea(2001),
which, as The Guardian put it, “claims to
be a novel but might equally be filed un-
der History, Philosophy, Art, or Myth and
Religion.” There was the idiosyncratic
memoirsThe Star Factory(1997), which
The Chicago Tribune called “a positive,

He earned a degree in English in 1971 at

Queen’s University, Belfast, then in 1975

took a job with the Arts Council of North-

ern Ireland. He would remain there until

1998, dealing first with traditional music

and then literature. His first poetry col-

lection,The New Estate, was published in

1976.

Mr. Carson – who was also an accom-

plished translator, working in several lan-

guages – viewed writing poetry not as an

exercise in setting down an idea but as an

exploration.

“The kind of examination question

which used to be put, ‘What did the poet

have in mind when he said ...’ is an as-

sumption that the poet clothes his

thought in verse,” he told The Spectator

in 2012, “whereas the poet often doesn’t

know what he has in mind: He follows

the language, and sees where it might

lead him, which is usually a very different

place from what he thought at the onset.

“If you know exactly what you are go-

ing to say in a poem,” he continued, “that

poem will be a failure. Besides, there is no

interest or fun, in saying what you al-

ready know.”

Mr. Carson, who was a skilled flutist,

married Deirdre Shannon, an accom-

plished fiddle player, in 1982. He leaves

her, as well as their three children, Man-

us, Gerard and Mary; and four siblings,

Caitlin, Pat, Brendan and Liam.

Mr. Carson had been struggling with

cancer for some time, and some of his

most recent poems mused on the ap-

proaching end of his life. One, called

Claude Monet: ‘The Artist’s Garden at Véth-

euil,’ 1880, published just two months ago

in The New Yorker, and part ofStill Life,a

collection to be published by Wake Forest

University Press early next year, conclud-

ed this way:

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.

NEWYORKTIMESNEWSSERVICE

loving, even celebratory evocation, the

work of a man determined to live an ordi-

nary urban life, and to clear in it a place

for the imagination.” There wasLast

Night’s Fun, his meditation on traditional

Irish music, each chapter bearing the title

of a beloved song.

“He leaves such a wide body of work

that people will have their own favou-

rites, including the magnificentBelfast

Confetti,” the President of Ireland, Mi-

chael D. Higgins, said in a statement.

“Representing Belfast in all its variety, the

memoirs and books, such asThe Star Fac-

tory, revealed a deep love of place.”

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born on Oct.

9, 1948, in Belfast. His father, William, was

a postman, and his mother, Mary (Mag-

gin) Carson, worked in linen mills. The

family was Roman Catholic and bilin-

gual, speaking the Irish language at

home, and Mr. Carson was raised with an

appreciation of words, their origins, their

sounds.

“I used to lull myself to sleep with lan-

guage,” he wrote inThe Star Factory,

“mentally repeating, for example, the

word capall, the Irish for horse, which

seemed to me more onomatopoeically

equine than its English counterpart;

gradually, its trochaic foot would sum-

mon up a ghostly echo of ‘cobble,’ till, wa-

vering between languages, I would allow

my disembodied self to drift out the win-

dow and glide through the silent dark

gas-lit streets above the mussel-coloured

cobblestones.”

VERSATILEBELFASTPOET

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CIARANCARSON

WRITER,70

NEILGENZLINGER

Ican’tsaywhytheformsin

whichIwritehavechanged

soradicallyovertheyears,

butitseemsweshouldadopt

newmethodsfornew

situations.Thesituation

demandstheform.

CIARANCARSON

ONTHECHANGINGSTRUCTURE

OFHISPOETRY

OBITUARIES

Born June 18, 1953, in Hamilton; died April 16,

2019, in Calgary; of metastatic melanoma;

aged 65.

M

arg Fitzhenry was tenacious

and never gave up on her goals.

The eldest of seven children,

she was born in the working-

class, east end of Hamilton. Life wasn’t

easy and everyone in the family contribut-

ed financially. After finishing high school,

she completed her nursing training in 1974

and shocked her family by announcing she

had saved $700 and was moving to Victo-

ria. She was determined to pursue her

dreams of a joyful and fulfilling life.

Marg found work as a Licensed Practical

Nurse at the Victoria Veterans’ hospital

where something near magical happened.

At the intersection of two corridors, with

Moon Riverplaying on the intercom, she

bumped into a friendly stranger – orderly

Ken Fitzhenry – who asked her to dance in

the hallway. She accepted. Their immedi-

ate connection led to marriage in 1976 and

43 joyous years together. Their son, Mi-

chael, was born in 1978. Both Ken and Marg

shared a mutual passion for health care; he

was an orthopedic technologist, and she

excelled as a compassionate nurse work-

ing for 35 years in radiation therapy at Cal-

gary’s Tom Baker Cancer Centre.

Being frugal and highly organized since

her early years – she always picked the

least expensive item on the menu and

scrutinized every grocery receipt – Marg

knew how to find the resources to support

the things that made Ken and Michael hap-

py. Ken was passionate about cars and mo-

torcycles and Michael wanted to learn how

to play the bagpipes (they sent him to

study in Scotland). Marg asked little for

herself but she took pleasure in a good bar-

gain, at volunteering for the local highland

games and loved her bright tartan leg-

gings. She also loved to call and chat: As

her sister Patricia said, “she could talk for

ages.” She also often remarked on the plea-

sure she found sitting behind Ken on mo-

torbike rides, enjoying the view as they

toured Alberta, British Columbia and near-

by American states. After Michael was

born, they travelled by car, often returning

East for special family occasions. Marg nev-

er forgot her roots in Ontario.

In retirement, Marg and Ken spent more

time in the warmth of Hawaii and Mexico

and travelled to Europe, especially enjoy-

ing Scotland, where Michael had moved in

2003. Marg was proud of her son, who,
      while pursuing his passion to play the bag-
      pipes, became a champion piper and met
      and married Alison in Paisley, Scotland,
      not far from where Marg’s family had origi-
      nally emigrated from to Canada.
      Marg was such a skilled and compas-
      sionate nurse that even in retirement she
      was called back to work. But no one ex-
      pected the scenario that unfolded on one
      of these shifts in January, when she be-
      came disoriented and was diagnosed with
      a metastasizing melanoma. She never gave
      way to despair, remaining positive as she
      underwent surgery, radiation and immu-
      notherapy. Even as a patient, she contin-
      ued to fuss over Ken, making sure he was
      eating well and getting his exercise. Her
      portrait now graces the Radiation Therapy
      Day Room.
      In her final moments, Marg was sur-
      rounded by family, listening to a recording
      of Michael playingLady MacDonald’s La-
      ment.
      At one of Marg’s memorials, a physician
      described her work as the essential link be-
      tween doctor and patient. Her words of-
      fered solace and hope. She had a quality
      that is generally unteachable, yet essential
      to a patient’s care: warmth, interest in
      their well-being and a commitment to
      help.
      During her treatment, no visitor could
      leave without a long hug as she repeated
      her mantra: “The longer the hug, the more
      beneficial.”

MaryValentichisMarg’sfriend;

MichaelFitzhenryisherson.

Wife.

Mother.

Nurse.

Friend.

MargFitzhenry

LIVESLIVED

MARGFITZHENRY

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C

iaran Carson was one of my
teachers at the 2018 summer
writing program offered by the
Seamus Heaney Centre for Po-
etry at Queen’s University, Belfast – a
transformative experience in my life as
a writer.
As a poet and writer of evocative and
lyrical prose, Mr. Carson had and has
few peers. Above all he loved language
deeply and elementally and he made it
his business to explore and exploit its
many intricacies in search of the perfect
word, the perfect phrase, the perfect
prosody, the perfect image. There
seemed to be nothing he couldn’t do
with the extraordinary tools he was giv-
en at birth – tools that he developed
and perfected over a too-short lifetime
of fastidious wordsmithing.
Mr. Carson cared enough about the
craft that it mattered greatly to him that

those with whom he worked learn to

think and speak insightfully, incisively

and clear-headedly about writing.

Once, during a close examination of

Robert Frost’sSnow, I answered one of

his surgical questions a little too quickly

and a little too glibly. He gave a porten-

tous sigh and simply posed the ques-

tion again to the student sitting next to

me. He could be prickly and blunt, but

he was invariably right. I was grateful

later to have opportunities to venture

observations about other poems; ob-

servations that drew from him a slight

nod and a few approving words. Re-

demption was hard won in his compa-

ny, but it was sweet indeed. Those privi-

leged to receive his guidance and in-

struction quickly recognized that he ex-

pected a great deal. He was not

gratuitous in his criticism; just pointed,

forceful and unerringly on point. This

was because he saw the work of the po-

et and the prose writer as being pro-

foundly important. Despite the fleeting

nature of our time together, it left me

and my mature-student classmates

changed and immensely grateful.

After much fretting, I steeled myself

once to ask whether he would mind in-

scribing a broadside of his wonderful

poemTurn Again. Mr. Carson was genu-

inely pleased to do it and after he did so

we fell into easy banter.

Mr. Carson was a kind and generous

man. A man who wanted those around

him who were in the thrall of the craft

to find their stride.

Godspeed, Ciaran Carson.

ThomasS.Woods,afreelancebook

reviewerforTheGlobeandMailfrom

1985to2007,writespoetryandfiction

underthepennameP.W.Bridgman.

IREMEMBER

CIARANCARSON