FARMINGTON – Acclaimed Irish poets Ciarán Carson and Sinead Morrissey read from their collections of poetry Wednesday night as part of the University of Maine at Farmington’s Visiting Writers Series.

Before Carson and Morrissey read their poems, professor Jeffrey Thomson spoke about his relationship to them.

“I’m really pleased to introduce to you two of the friends I made on my sabbatical to Ireland last year,” Thomsan told the crowd. “We all know what a poetry culture that Ireland has, so to have both of them here is an incredible treat for us. They’ve traveled a long way, so I’m very appreciate for their time and their words and their wisdom, and their friendship.”

Senior Laura Cowie introduced Carson, describing his poetry as “personal and political,” and “image-based, location-based and Belfast-based.”

Carson, who is also the director of the Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry in Belfast, surprised the audience by playing a brief song on a piccolo titled “Táimse ‘im Chodladh,” which in English, means “I Am Asleep.”

“That song belongs to a genre of song in Ireland known as ‘aisling,’ which means ‘dream vision,” Carson explained. “As I grew older, it seems a lot of the things I do are aislings of one kind or another, entering that strange world where we’re not quite ourselves and we’re confused of why we’re here and what we’re doing with language and words.”

Many of the poems that Carson read blended the Irish and English language together, and each poem was centered around war imagery and violence.

At times, Carson peppered humorous anecdotes throughout his reading, such as when he explained how he hurt his head while arriving in America.

“I was getting my books out of Jeff’s car this morning, and I opened the boot,” Carson said, before stopping, staring at the crowd for a moment and saying, “Well, not the boot. Sorry, over here, you call it the ‘trunk.’

The audience laughed as he continued, “I opened the trunk, and it smote me right here.” Carson pointed to the band-aid on his head as the audience laughed.

“Well, stuff happens,” Carson said, smiling.

Following Carson’s reading, senior Max Eyes introduced Sinead Morrissey, who won the UK National Poetry Competition and teaches with Carson at the Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry in Belfast.

“Her style cannot be summed up,” Eyes said. “She blends lyric rhythm, narrative and vulnerable sensory detail to evoke a breathtaking moment, a moment where the readers can slip into the hushed excitement of youth and reveal their inner child. Her poems are simply brilliant.”

Morrissey thanked Thomson for inviting her and Carson to the campus and showing her around Farmington. She read from her collection of poems titled “Through the Square Window” and from her new book “Parallax,” which will be published in September.

“’Parallax’ is mostly concerned with two things: the history of old photographs and the Soviet Union, and I’d like to read you one of the Soviet Union poems,” Morrissey said. She read the poem “Shostakovich,” which refers to Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Morrissey also read from a poem that referenced the ice storm of 1998, despite admitting that “she knows next to nothing about ice storms.”

“I always say ‘Write about what you don’t know,’” said Morrissey as the audience laughed.

In lieu of the usual question-and-answer segment at the end of the reading, Thomson said Carson and Morrissey would talk one-on-one with students about their poems and sign books.

Carson is the author of a number of collections of poetry, including “The Irish for No,” which won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, “Belfast Confetti,” “First Language,” which won the T.S Eliot Prize, “Breaking News,” “For All We Know” and “On the Night Watch.”

Sinead Morrissey is the author of five poetry collections: “There Was Fire in Vancouver,” “Between Here and There,” “The State of the Prisons,” “Through the Square Window” and “Parallax,” all of which are published by Carcanet Press.

The next Visiting Writers Series will take place on April 11, when Mexico resident Monica Wood reads from her memoir “When We Were Kennedys.”

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