Shamrock Tea

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [xii], 308. Green cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine; emerald green endpapers. Selected sources to rear.

Signed by Author to title page. With a postcard copy (National Gallery, London) of the painting laid in.

Long listed for the 2001 Booker Prize and winner of a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001 Award. 101 short stories and essays, exploring the array of symbols in Jan van Eyck's enigmatic painting 'The Arnolfini Marriage' (1434), depicting a Bruges merchant and his wife.

A member of the Aosdána [association of artists] and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Carson was one of the "Belfast Group" of poets, which included Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. Deeply influenced by the poetry of Louis MacNeice, as well as by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, he went on to publish 14 collections of poetry including The Irish for No, Belfast Confetti, The Twelfth of Never and For All We Know.

"Shamrock Tea is a magic carpet embroidered with stories within stories." –San Francisco Chronicle