About
Join an immersive walking tour where Liam Carson will be reading from Belfast Twilight (Salmon Poetry), a collection of haiku that explore landscape, nature, family life, and memory. Presented in haikai (or haiku sequences), it creates kaleidoscopic montages that evoke various worlds – from Belfast’s docklands at twilight to windswept islands off the west…
Join an immersive walking tour where Liam Carson will be reading from Belfast Twilight (Salmon Poetry), a collection of haiku that explore landscape, nature, family life, and memory. Presented in haikai (or haiku sequences), it creates kaleidoscopic montages that evoke various worlds – from Belfast’s docklands at twilight to windswept islands off the west of Ireland. He will be accompanied by saxophonist Seán Mac Erlaine, acclaimed by the Irish Times as ‘one of the most interesting and adventurous musicians of his generation’.
The meeting point for this walk will be the reception in the Johnston Room in the North Range of IMMA Venues.
Liam Carson is the founder and director of the IMRAM Irish-Language Literature Festival, which stages multi-media literary productions that fuse poetry, prose, visual art and music to promote writing in Irish. He is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir call mother a lonely field, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2013. Belfast Twilight is his first haiku collection. Of it, poet Paula Meehan has said: ‘From a whole scene Liam Carson distils an essence; he conjures in the mind’s eye a world in a raindrop, a panorama in a grain of sand. This is the important work of the haiku — powerfully directed attention, language pared, the found world and its range of resonance pinned in a few words, in a few lines. It’s agile and sturdy enough to encompass the Troubles of his native Belfast, family life, rambles in Ireland and beyond, nature rapture, punk. You could sing it if you had a tune! Out of individual poems here, out of the many sequences, each with its specific focus, Carson gives us a whole interlocking world — fresh, compelling, familiar and properly strange.’
Seán Mac Erlaine is a musician and composer specialising in woodwinds and electronics. He studied jazz performance in Newpark Music Centre under Ronan Guilfoyle where he also taught for a number of years before completing his formal education at Dublin Institute of Technology where he was awarded a Masters in Jazz Performance as well as a PhD focusing on solo woodwind performance with live electronics. He plays alto saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet. He has performed with leading musicians including Jan Bang, Bill Frisell, David Toop, Ernst Reijseger, The Smith Quartet, Hayden Chisholm, Eivind Aarset, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Ronan Guilfoyle, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Damo Suzuki and The Gloaming. The Irish Times describes Mac Erlaine as ‘consistently one of the most interesting and adventurous musicians of his generation.’
