Malcolm Carson was born in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. He moved to Belfast with his family before returning to Lincolnshire, becoming an auctioneer and then a farm labourer. He studied English at Nottingham University, and then taught in colleges and universities. He now lives in Carlisle, Cumbria. He has published five full collections: Breccia in 2006, Rangi Changi and other poems in 2011, Route Choice in 2016, The Where and When in 2019 and Edgar in 2023, as well as a pamphlet, Cleethorpes Comes to Paris in 2014. All are from Shoestring Press.
 
All except Breccia available from Central Books or the author.
 
Review comments on Edgar:
 

So often this is how Carson’s poetry functions; the acutely observed … meets the poet’s mind as Edgar struggles to stay in control of Tom… There’s something distinctly English in this scenario, described as if the poet is both dramatis persona and spectator.
 
Carson responds to the linguistic potential in our time of Edgar’s lines.

 

Helen May Williams, The High Window

 
 

Significantly, the poems aren’t set near Gloucester’s castle or Dover, but in Carson’s own Cumbria, along the rivers Eden and Gelt and the Solway Firth. In Carson’s poems, Edgar’s escape into the wild (‘The fell’s the place where I will range / free from all constraint’) is less to do with his physical safety than the restorative powers of nature. Concentrating on a heron or watching a kingfisher and other riverine wildlife by the Eden is a form of mindfulness, ‘for too much / cogitation draws me down / to depths where sorrow lies.’ Recent events have given Carson’s choice of subject a wider, political relevance. With the wrong people in power, it feels very much as if we’re waiting for order to be restored at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, or as “Edgar regards the politicians” puts it: ‘a rebalancing / of order after the dark hours of a disordered world’.

 

Stephen Claughton, London Grip

 
 

and comments on others:
 

Some books surprise and this one is no exception. Whether he is writing about an exchange of words in a Grimsby fish shop that trigger unexpectedly an account of the journeys of Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a romantic relationship that is described in terms of a tennis match or the hushed wonder of discovering great crested newts under a lifted log, Malcolm Carson has a way of enthralling us with his delivery.

 

Neil Leadbeater on The Where and When, The High Window

 
 

‘Malcolm Carson’s Breccia is a find… It suggests a kind of modesty yet solidity at the same time… The voice is strong, the language sensuously enacts what is being described… you should be able to tell that this is very much my kind of book. Anyone who likes reading fine poems will think so too.

 

Matt Simpson, Stride Magazine

 
 

[Rangi Changi] ticks most boxes for me. Constantly engaging in subject and language… This is another fine collection from Shoestring. Read it.

 

David Ashbee, South

 
 

Musical, resigned, sensuous… So persuasive is Carson’s voice.

 

Nigel Jarrett, Acumen