Ciaran Carson, whose poetry and prose captured the pungency, tensions and rich heritage of Northern Ireland, especially his native Belfast, died in that 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 been “Belfast 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 hyphenated 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 shorter, fragmented ones.