In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated its 30th anniversary. We marked the occasion by looking back at the collections which have won ‘the Prize poets most want to win’ (Sir Andrew Motion).

First Language by Ciaran Carson (Gallery Press) was awarded the first T. S. Eliot Prize in 1993.

James Conor Paterson, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022 for his collection bandit country (Picador), paid a wonderful tribute to Ciaran Carson, his former teacher, at the T. S. Eliot Prize Readings at the Royal Festival Hall in January. So we asked James to recommend a poem from Carson’s T. S. Eliot Prize-winning First Language. He wrote:

The one I’m thinking of is called ‘The Brain of Edward Carson’. It concerns influential Irish Unionist politician Edward Carson, who was responsible for the Ulster Covenant, the establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force and for involvement in the Government of Ireland Act and the partition of the island. Ciaran’s poem about Carson is characterised by his use of the long line, training his curatorial eye on creating an atmosphere of a particular place and time, and incorporating the rhythms of Irish traditional music into the lyric form.
          Edward Carson is presented here as the corpse of Ulster splayed out on an autopsy table, a kind of automaton made up from machine parts and the detritus associated with the Irish War of Independence era. Similar to Heaney, Ciaran’s work utilises symbolism with an exactitude that speaks to larger socio-political issues and the legacy of war on contemporary Ireland.

A multi-award-winning poet and, from 2003, Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast, Ciaran Carson died on 6 October 2019. You can read a tribute to him on the Gallery Press website. 

About the T. S. Eliot Prize

The T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2023. Awarded annually to the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland, the Prize was founded by the Poetry Book Society in 1993 to celebrate the PBS’s 40th birthday and to honour its founding poet. The T. S. Eliot Estate has provided the prize money since the Prize’s inception in 1993, and the T. S. Eliot Foundation took over the running of the Prize following the acquisition of the PBS by InPress Books in 2016. For more on the history of the Prize, visit tseliot.com/prize