Robert Corteen Carswell

Robert Corteen Carswell (born 1950) is a poet and editor of a major anthology of Manx Literature titled Manannan’s Cloak (Francis Boutle Publishers, 2010). He has also been a dancer, musician and teacher of Manx. He has worked in broadcasting Manx since the 1970s, creating the content for a weekly Manx language slot on Manx Radio called Claare ny Gael. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s Carswell was also prolific in print, writing for columns in the Manx Star (‘Noon as Noal’ / ‘From Here and From There’) and the Isle of Man Weekly Times (‘Cree ny Cooish’ /‘The Heart of the Matter’) and founding and editing a Manx magazine called FRITLAG (which translates as ‘Rag’) and a collection of poems called Shelg y Drane (Hunt the Rhyme, a pun on ‘Shelg y Drean’/ ‘Hunt the Wren’, an old Christmas tradition in the Island). Carswell says of his work: ‘I use a number of methods in my poems. First there are songs – with rhyming words at the end of the line. Then, there are other poems with rhyming words inside the lines … The sounds of vowels and consonants make up the rhyme, or the sounds of the words themselves copy meaning. I have also created poems by simply using a syllable count. It’s all about the language and finding (new) ways to make it work.’