Ciaran Carson

Front matter

CIARAN CARSON

SPACE, PLACE, WRITING

LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES 58

Chapter 1: Imaginative Geographies: The Politics and Poetics of

Space 23 Chapter 2: Mapping Belfast: Urban Cartographies 57 Chapter 3: Deviations from the Known Route: Reading,

Writing, Walking 85 Chapter 4: Revised Versions: Place and Memory 112 Chapter 5: Spatial Stories: Narrative and Representation 143 Chapter 6: Babel-babble: Language and Translation 175 Bibliography 216 General Index 227 Index of Works 235

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Acknowledgements

This book has been in the works for several years and I have accumulated many debts of gratitude during that time. Firstly, to Ciaran Carson, whose writing is the subject of this book, and who has been generous in correspondence but also tactfully left me to my own devices — which is exactly as it should be. My colleagues at Trinity College Carmarthen and the University of Nottingham have been immensely supportive and encouraging throughout the process. I want especially to thank Sarah Davison, Menna Elfyn, Matt Green, Brean Hammond, Dominic Head, David James, Sean Matthews, Lynda Pratt, Mark Robson, Jeni Williams, and Paul Wright. I have also learned much from the students I have been fortunate to teach at both institutions. I am particularly grateful to Conor Carville, John Goodby, Eamonn Hughes, Elmer Kennedy- Andrews, Jim Moran, Julie Sanders, Laura Wainwright, and Danny Weston who each read and commented upon draft material at various stages of the writing process. The book has benefited considerably from their insights and knowledge, though I am, of course, responsible for any errors of conception or execution that remain. For stimulating conversations on Carson’s work and other topics I also wish to thank Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Sarah Brouillette, Alice Entwistle, Colin Graham, Anne Jamison, Richard Kirkland, Sinéad Sturgeon, and Conor Wyer. At Liverpool University Press, Anthony Cond’s consistent enthusiasm for the project has been much appreciated, and I am indebted to Helen Tookey for her diligence in seeing it through to publication. My brother, Gareth, has cheered me on from the sidelines, as have the Phillips and Davies families in Wales. My greatest debts are to my parents, Colin and Barbara, for giving me so many opportunities and ensuring that I used them; and to my wife, Tina, whose love, support, and companionship has made everything possible.

Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 3 have appeared respectively as: ‘Mapping Junkspace: Ciaran Carson’s Urban Cartographies’, Textual Practice 21.3 (2007), pp. 505-32; and “Deviations from the Known Route:

viii CIARAN CARSON: SPACE, PLACE, WRITING

Writing and Walking in Ciaran Carson’s Belfast’, Irish Studies Review 16.1 (2008), pp. 41-54. The receipt of a British Academy Small Research Grant allowed me to make an important visit in July 2009 to the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library (MARBL) at Emory University to consult their collection of Carson’s papers. For permission to quote from Carson’s published work I am grateful to: the author; The Gallery Press; Wake Forest University Press; Random House Group; Granta Books; and Penguin Books. I also thank MARBL for allowing me to quote unpublished material from the Ciaran Carson papers.

Abbreviations

AP The Alexandrine Plan (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1998)

BC Belfast Confetti (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1989)

BN Breaking News (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2003)

FAWK For All We Know (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2008)

FFA Fishing for Amber: A Long Story (London: Granta, 1999)

FL First Language (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1993)

IC The Insular Celts (Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1973)

IDA The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (London: Granta, 2002)

IFN The Irish for No (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1987)

ITM Trish Traditional Music (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1986)

LE The Lost Explorer (Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1978)

LNF Last Nights Fun: About Music, Food and Time (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996)

MC The Midnight Court (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2005)

NE The New Estate (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1976)

NEOP The New Estate and Other Poems (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1988)

OEC Opera Et Cetera (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1996)

ONW On the Night Watch (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2009)

SF The Star Factory (London: Granta, 1997)

ST Shamrock Tea (London: Granta, 2001)

T The Táin (London: Penguin, 2007)

TN The Twelfth of Never (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1998)

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Introduction

The publication in 2008 of Ciaran Carson’s Collected Poems, timed to coincide with the poet’s sixtieth birthday, is an obvious milestone along the way of his development as a writer. Leafing through its nearly 600 pages, which include work from eight principal collections produced over a period of more than thirty years, the reader is likely to be struck by the extraordinary scope and resourcefulness of Carson’s writing. Experimental rather than self-consciously avant-garde, Carson’s poetry exhibits a remarkable linguistic inventiveness, formal complexity, and intellectual daring, always making a concerted effort to communicate with the reader yet also foregrounding the resistances that poetic language affords to habitual modes of perception and understanding. His writing often seems intoxicated with the myriad sensations and experiential atoms it attempts to register and record, wielding a microscopic focus upon the particular that freely transmits a MacNeicean awareness of ‘the drunkenness of things being various’ to his readers.! Equally vertiginous is his almost paranoiac intuition of concealed patterns and linkages, so that it often appears that an infinity of connections may proceed from a single observation. Carson first made his name as a brilliant anatomist of the city and urban experience, topics that continue to occupy a central role in his aesthetic; but recently he has emerged as a Borgesian miniaturist of the universal, exploring the fractal worlds within worlds created in and by language.

His Collected Poems admirably illustrates this and other aspects of his creative evolution, yet it is also in some ways necessarily deficient in conveying the full extent of Carson’s versatility and volatility as a writer. For instance, an artificial distinction seems to be drawn between his original poetry and his books of translations, so that there is no place in the Collected Poems for The Alexandrine Plan or for the versions of poems by Stefan Augustin Doinas that originally appeared in Opera Et Cetera. At the same time, the volume’s inclusion of his versions of Japanese haiku in Belfast Confetti and translations from the French,

Irish, and Latin in First Language admits the prominence of translation to Carson’s own creative practice. Of course, there is no room here for Carson’s accomplished and highly distinctive prose texts, which have nonetheless assumed increasing importance within his oeuvre in recent years. Furthermore, whatever claims to comprehensiveness the Collected Poems might make are qualified by the fact that Carson has swiftly followed it with a new collection of poems, On the Night Watch, and a novel, The Pen Friend. Consequently, one of the key challenges that Carson’s work makes to readers and critics alike is, not of assimilating, but of engaging adequately with its sheer variorum multiplicity and miscellaneity, which can be by turns exhilarating and forbidding.

With such challenges firmly in mind, this book seeks to undertake a detailed and comprehensive study of all of Carson’s work to date, in poetry, prose, and translations. It is structured thematically rather than chronologically or on a book-by-book basis, in an effort to identify and appraise recurrent tropes or concerns as they are manifest across his oeuvre and in the different genres in which he writes. Because Carson often returns to and reworks themes and forms employed earlier in his career, in much the same manner in which a musical fugue unfolds through a series of subtly modulated repeats and refrains, I have found it productive to proceed by way of zigzags and switchbacks rather than in a straight line, and hope that the reader will also. As my subtitle suggests, an abiding frame of reference throughout is the nexus of concerns linking space, place, and writing; and it is primarily as an Irish urban writer that I consider Carson here, the most important figure in this regard since James Joyce. Indeed, Carson has acknowledged the influence of Joyce’s ‘rendering of the music of the city’ upon his work in a recent interview.2 For Neil Corcoran, Joyce’s influence is most evident in Carson’s remarkable ability to define ‘the contours of a social and psychic map of the city’. Certainly, an astute awareness of the interdependence of topography and psychology is present in the work of both writers. Joyce famously told Frank Budgen that in Ulysses he wanted ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book’4 A similar desire to represent the city both comprehensively and in its infinite particularity is apparent in Carson's depictions of Belfast, though, like Joyce, he is keenly attuned to the city’s symbolic overtones and oneiric potential — the fastidious recording of realistic detail is only one facet of his engagements with urban space.

Of course, Joyce wrote Ulysses not in Dublin but in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, whereas Carson has lived and worked in Belfast all of his life; yet he is also capable of seeing his home place through the eyes of an outsider or resident alien, imbuing it with a sheen of estrangement that qualifies any too easy accord between self and place. This combination of proximity and distance, intimacy and irony produces an effect akin to that of parallax, whereby shifts in perspective lay bare the processes through which a sense of place is constructed and deconstructed. As a consequence, Carson’s writing exemplifies Shane Alcobia-Murphy's comment that “Northern Irish writers and artists are doing more than simply undermining the stable narratives of “place”; their work functions as intense and recondite explorations of the power relations that inhere within those narratives’.5 My sense of the centrality of issues of space and place in Carson’s work is intended to be supple enough that lateral and radial links to his related concerns with language and narrative, memory and history, violence and power can be forged in the chapters that follow. Nonetheless, before proceeding to consider these, it may be useful to trace in some more detail the curvature of his career arc thus far, from The Insular Celts to On the Night Watch, and to sketch in some details of the biographical, literary, and historical contexts that will be important to my readings of his texts.

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born on 9 October 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to William Carson (or Liam McCarráin as he liked to be known) and Mary Carson (née Maginn). He is one of four children and the family lived initially at 100 Raglan Street in the Lower Falls area of West Belfast, which serves as a recurrent locus in his writing, before moving in the late 1950s to Mooreland Drive, Andersonstown, the “new estate” of his first book. His father's job as a postman and flair for storytelling have both made significant impressions upon Carson’s means of navigating the city and handling narrative, while his frequent recourse to metaphors of weaving and patchworks owe something to the influence of his mother, who had worked as a doffer in a Falls Road linen mill. Both of his parents learned Irish as a second language, and it was used exclusively as the language of the home, the Carson children learning English only at school or on the streets. This formative bilingualism not only lies behind Carson’s wide-ranging interests in translation but also inflects his awareness of how social and political discourses function in Northern Ireland, making him “deeply suspicious of language in general’, though ‘not averse to the pleasure to be had from words’. Carson was educated at St Gall’s and Slate Street schools, then at St Mary’s Christian Brothers School and Queen’s University, Belfast, where he studied

English and attended some of the last meetings of the Group, a nowlegendary writers’ workshop established by Philip Hobsbaum in 1963.

Although the Group's importance has been both over-stated and toostrenuously denied, Heather Clark contends that by bringing writers such as Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Seamus Deane, and Paul Muldoon, and critics including Michael Allen, Edna Longley, and Arthur Terry together in a context of discussion and debate, its meetings provided “a space within which the poets could define themselves against each other”? Similarly, Fran Brearton describes the Group as an ‘aesthetic collision ground” that established a matrix of influences that has shaped the work of many Northern Irish poets long after its demise.8 Carson’s involvement with the Group in the early 1970s was belated and fairly peripheral, though it played a role in introducing him to his contemporaries. He recalls it as a less rigid affair than Hobsbaum’s original seminar, ‘a moveable feast’ that often convened in the pubs close to the university:

It would have been in one or other of these places that I first got to know the likes of the poets Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Trevor McMahon, Robert Johnstone and Paul Muldoon, the prose writer Bernard MacLaverty, the painter and poet Jack Pakenham and the critic Michael Allen; later Medbh McGuckian and John Morrow. We would talk books, sport, politics, music, art and the weather. I think we were mutually supportive, but heavy slagging was also par for the course.?

At this time, Frank Ormsby was editor of the journal Zhe Honest Ulsterman where Carson began to publish poems and book reviews, and Ormsby was also instrumental in the publication of Carson’s first pamphlet, The Insular Celts, in 1973. The 14 poems included therein are relatively conventional in their forms and subject matter, but announce the decisive influence of early Irish poetry and disclose their acute observations of landscape and human occupations in ways that anticipate some of his subsequent work.

A wry note appended to The Insular Celts described Carson, with telegraphic brevity, as being ‘at present unsatisfactorily employed as civil servant’ (IC, 20), and a stint of teaching would follow before he was appointed to a more congenial post as Traditional Arts Officer with the Arts Council for Northern Ireland in 1975. This was to be an immensely important role for Carson both personally and for the development of his poetry and prose writing, which have extensively adapted formal models and themes from Irish music, songs, and oral traditions such as storytelling. In the same year he also published a sharply critical review of Seamus Heaney’s volume, North, the appearance of which marked ‘a watershed in Northern Irish literary relations’, igniting a series of often fierce debates over the relationships between poetry and politics, myth and history against the backdrop of the Troubles.!° Carson’s review set the terms in which future interventions would be made, and his criticisms are threefold. Firstly, he notes that Heaney himself ‘seems to have acquired the status of myth, of institution’, something confirmed for him by Edward McGuire's idealised portrait of the poet, and North succumbs to this notion in its grandiosity and ambition. In poems such as ‘Funeral Rites’, Heaney appears to be “trying to emulate Eliot, or Yeats, or both, in a quest for importance’! Secondly, the collection’s unevenness arises from Heaney’s competing impulses towards precision and abstraction, with abstraction finally winning out and finding expression in ‘a superstructure of myth and symbol’ — specifically, through parallels between the Northern Irish conflict and Iron Age fertility rites or Viking customs.

Carson bemoans Heaney’s transformation ‘from being a writer with the gift of precision, to become the laureate of violence — a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, and apologist for “the situation”, in the last resort, a mystifier’!2 Thirdly, and most importantly, he argues that Heaney neglects the political consequences of the violence he anatomises and, in doing so, tends to elide history into myth: ‘It is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened; they happened then, they happen now, and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution.” On the contrary, such transhistorical coherence is only achieved by ‘falsifying issues’ and ‘applying wrong notions of history instead of seeing whats before your eyes’.!3 Besides being an oblique expression of what Harold Bloom calls ‘the anxiety of influence’,!4 Carson's commentary on North reveals a good deal about his own priorities and presuppositions as a young writer. Firstly, it shows that he tends to deprecate the authority arrogated to the poet as spokesman; secondly, that he values precision and exactitude in poetry’s dealings with the world; and thirdly, that he abhors the obfuscations of abstraction and myth where matters of history and politics are concerned.

Some of these characteristics are highlighted by Tom Paulin in an admiring review of Carson’s first full-length collection, Zhe New Estate, which was published the following year. Expressing a strong preference for those poems dealing with ‘the mysterious idealism’ of work and craft, culture and industry over his occasional flirtations with Celticism, Paulin praises Carson’s ‘deft realism’ and ‘mysterious, exact clarity’, affirming that it is for ‘a realism of subject, with a novelist’s interest in ordinary life, that The New Estate is notable’.15 Paulin also remarks on the balance Carson achieves between ‘studied formal perfection’ and ‘real contact with life’, a balance maintained in his pamphlet, Zhe Lost Explorer, which appeared in 1978 and extended his thematic concerns to take in travel and ethnographic encounters.!° However, while he continued to publish occasional poems in the following years, Carson’s increasing immersion in the culture of traditional music and song appears to have led to a growing disaffection with lyric poetry, and a long break ensued before the publication of his next collection, The Irish for No, in 1987. Commenting upon this period, he has said that poetry seemed to him ‘a self-centred, precious kind of business’: “Whereas with the music — you're right up against the stuff, it’s hitting you from all sides, it’s alive, here in front of your very eyes and ears, right now. That’s a very attractive immediacy. It’s not about withdrawing into your cell to compose these careful utterances about life.17 Ironically, the mastery of form and scrupulous concision that are evident in his early poetry may also have contributed to a sense of deadlock, the well-made poem appearing illsuited to engaging meaningfully with immediate social, public concerns. As David Trotter has remarked, ‘an appetite for public matters means an appetite for matters that will never yield to coherence or consolation. It means learning the language in which such matters are incoherently and unconsolingly discussed.18 While Carson was occupied in playing, recording, and writing about traditional music in the intervening years, culminating in the publication of his Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music in 1986, he was also, consciously or unconsciously, looking for ways of approximating its immediacy, spontaneity, and rich sociality in writing. A significant complicating factor is likely to have been the characteristic dilemma for the Northern Irish poet of ‘finding a voice that speaks to and through the conflict’.!9

The Irish for No made a significant impact upon its publication. John Goodby describes its effect as that of a ‘radical transformation of the Northern Irish poetry scene’ during the late 1980s,2° and its innovations were both formal and thematic. Immediately striking was its use of a very long line, often stretching beyond the right-hand margin of the page, for which there were several models: the work of the American poet C.K. Williams, especially his volume Tar; the rhythms and pacing of an Irish four-bar reel; storytelling and pub-talk; the 17 syllables of Japanese haiku; and the elongated phrases of ‘sean-nos’ singing.?! Equally important, however, were its decisive and imaginatively charged explorations of the city of Belfast as both a physical place and an affective nexus. This turn towards urban subject-matter, and its dual focus, had been foreshadowed in a review article written by Carson in 1983, which began with a characteristic affirmation:

We live in the Belfast of dreams as much as the physical city. These rehearsals of reality have gone on for years, changing, recurring, twisting back into themselves in a maze of self-reference. Some places do not exist on the map, but are composed of fragments, memories, inventions, other dreams.22

This passage condenses a series of recurrent tropes, techniques, and thematic preoccupations that can be traced throughout much of Carson’s subsequent writing: the collocation of reality and dream; a conception of urban experience as both constantly changing and recurrent; an interest in maps and their telling absences; an emphasis upon composing collages of fragments rather than illusory wholes. All of these features would be amplified and refined in the poems collected in The Irish for No.

Carson’s concentrated focus upon Belfast’s history, geography, and social life is even more intense in his subsequent volume, Belfast Confetti, which is also more formally diverse, including versions of haiku and prose texts alongside short and longer narrative poems employing the long line. The topics dealt with in both collections are various, circulating around memory, desire, identity, power, place and its multiple meanings, but there is also an unusually visceral engagement with the realities of civil discord and political violence, and individual poems depict sectarian murders, ambushes, suicides, street riots, and interrogations with a disturbing documentary candour. This has led to Carson being spoken of as a politically engaged ‘social’ writer, a label that he distrusts and refuses.23 ‘I can't as a writer,’ he has said, ‘take any kind of moral stance on the “Troubles”, beyond registering what happens. And then, as soon as I say that, I realise that “registering” is a kind of morality. Nor can one, even if one wanted to, escape politics.’24 His poems attempt to negotiate this double-bind between registering what happens and implicit moral statement through their reflexive attention to the ways in which events are mediated and represented, as much in the news media as in writing or art. To this end, they tend to implicate the reader in the construction of narratives about the Troubles, raising ethical questions concerning the writer’s and reader’s shared culpability in the ‘aestheticisation of conflict’.25

The medium of language itself becomes the predominant focus in Carson’s subsequent collections, First Language and Opera Et Cetera, both of which include translations from several languages and otherwise expand the parameters of English through a heady intermixture of widely divergent discourses and exuberant word-play. Nonetheless, the urgent social realities of the Troubles remain an ever-present frame of reference throughout, and the poems’ recurrent concerns with doublespeak, informers, censorship, and shibboleths ensure that their fantastic or surreal narratives often reveal an undertow of political immediacy. As Alan Gillis notes, ‘Carson’s language-games are also war-poems in which a predatory realism stalks his emancipatory drives which, nevertheless, remain insatiable’.2° Indeed, Carson’s linguistic experimentalism seems intended as an antidote to the stagnancy and formality of those cultural discourses and formulations of identity that predominate in Northern Ireland, a reminder of art’s capacity to enlarge our potential for expression and communication. There is also a shift of focus away from the materiality of the city and towards that of language itself, often at the level of its individual components — Opera Et Cetera, for instance, includes two poetic sequences based upon the letters of the alphabet and the radio operator’s code respectively. This is accompanied by a foregrounding of poetic form and much more extensive use of rhyme, often as a means of highlighting arbitrary connections and as a generative mechanism for narrative itself.

In 1996 Carson published the first of his several prose books, Last Night’s Fun, which gives an eccentric account of the Irish traditional music scene and much else besides. Formally, the book approximates to the social experience of a pub session, with each of the chapters named after a tune (‘Boil the Breakfast Early, “Ihe Humours of Whiskey’, “The Ould Orange Flute’ etc.), and its multi-layered narrative interleaves notes and observations, reminiscences and meditations, stories and songs in a deliberately digressive and non-linear manner. The Star Factory appeared the following year and made use of many of the same techniques to deal with more explicitly autobiographical material, elaborating a kaleidoscopic urban memoir that eschews any straightforward or coherent narrative of the growth of the poet’s mind. Chapters are named after streets and buildings, or other architectural features of the city, so that the book resembles an unconventional guidebook to Belfast or an annotated street index, figuring the relationship between self and place in spatial as well as temporal terms, and undertaking a series of intriguing forays into the imagined and remembered city. Both of these texts thrive on their own miscellaneity, blurring generic boundaries and defying summation while simultaneously disclosing a profound interest in systems of ordering and classification — musical notation, songbooks, dictionaries, street plans, gazetteers, and many others.

In 1998 Carson took early retirement from the Arts Council and embarked on a period of prolific and very varied productivity. In the same year he published The Alexandrine Plan, a collection of supplely inventive translations of sonnets by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé written in rhymed alexandrines. Three more book-length translations have subsequently appeared, each of them serving to underline the importance of translation for Carson as a mode of creative expression: in 2002 his version of Dante’s Inferno, then a translation of Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court, and most recently his retelling of the Old Irish epic, The Tain. As 1 will discuss in Chapter 6, translation has provided Carson with a means of carrying on a dialogue with major texts from the Irish and European traditions, as well as another way of exploring the various other-worlds that open up in the fissures between languages. Shortly after The Alexandrine Plan Carson published The Twelfth of Never, a hallucinatory sonnet sequence again written in alexandrines but also drawing extensively upon the Irish ballad tradition for its rhythms, subject-matter, and the titles of individual poems. Switching rapidly between different places and times, and marshalling a bewildering cast of historical and mythological characters, the book blends history, memory, and surreal fantasy in a concerted scrambling of Ireland’s sectarian iconographies. As David Butler observes, The Twelfth of Never describes a never-land of intoxication and metamorphosis ‘in which two irreconcilable traditions have become entangled, their shibboleths undermined by conflation and hypallage'.27 The broader context of Northern Ireland’s emergent ‘peace process’ and the new political dispensation promised by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 are important here, for the putative end of the Troubles saw a new optimism and fluidity in cultural and economic relations coexisting with the hardening of political divisions and the ‘institutionalized separateness’ of the province’s communities.28

Carson’s interest in the clashing symbols, narratives, and myths of Unionist and Nationalist cultures in Ireland is pursued in another direction in his prose texts, Fishing for Amber and Shamrock Tea, which might be thought of as his ‘Orange’ and ‘Green’ books respectively. The former sustains a detailed interest in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, exploring its rich achievements in art, science, and politics in order to provide oblique parallels with contemporary Northern Ireland and to implicitly rebuke the warped psychology of Ulster 'Orangeism'. The latter, by contrast, makes a series of links

IO CIARAN CARSON: SPACE, PLACE, WRITING across different time periods between Ireland and Belgium as part of a baroque satire on Catholic transcendentalism and Nationalist secret societies. Fishing for Amber is deeply indebted to the traditions of Irish oral storytelling, whereas Shamrock Tea displays a science-fictional fascination with alternative realities and identities, but both texts attempt an encyclopaedic comprehensiveness that defies generic categorisation and contrasts with the narrowness and inflexibility of the ideologies they indirectly invoke.

In 2003 Carson took up the position of Professor of Poetry and Director of the newly created Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast, roles that he connects with the need to demonstrate “that writing has a real and necessary place in our lives; that writing can make pleasurable sense of our lives’.2? In the same year he published Breaking News, a collection of poems inspired in part by the war correspondence of the Anglo-Irish journalist, William Howard Russell (1820-1907), and in part by the historical associations of Belfast street names with colonial conflicts in the Crimea and India. The volume's depictions of the city's contemporaneity are thus informed by a dense layering of spatial and temporal inter-relations. One of the most striking features of the collection is Carson’s use of a very short line, often of only one or two words, where the placing of line breaks and the shape of the poems on the page are integral to their subtle effects of disclosure and elision, connection and disconnection. Indeed, Sarah Broom observes that many of the poems in Breaking News ‘convey in their hesitations and silences a sense of the difficulty of saying anything at all about Belfast’3° Recurrent concerns with surveillance and the consequences of war indicate a distinct sense of unease and frustration with the progress of the peace process, and Carson also displays a Wittgensteinian preoccupation with the limits of language in contexts of political pressure and social complexity.

A similar awareness of the frailties and duplicity of language is balanced against a sense of its manifold possibilities in Carson’s next collection of poetry, For All We Know, which also continues and develops the tendency of his later work to favour long sequences where the meanings of individual poems depend upon the intricate relations and echoes orchestrated by the whole. As Carson has said, For All We Know is ‘a kind of hall of mirrors with poems reflecting and commenting on others’.3! Formally, the book is a loose sonnet sequence written in alexandrines and divided into two mirrored halves of 35 poems each (multiples of seven recur obsessively throughout), though its structure is

INTRODUCTION IT also based upon the contrapuntal variations and refrains of fugue so that images, phrases, and motifs recur repeatedly in different contexts. The convoluted narrative it relates concerns two lovers, Nina and Gabriel, who meet in a second-hand clothes shop in Belfast, and follows them across Europe as their personal relationship becomes bound up with the murky world of Cold War espionage and political intrigue. This allows Carson to explore the confusions of identity and memory at the intersection of private and public worlds, besides showcasing a newfound talent for writing about love and desire in their most complex manifestations. His most recent collection, On the Night Watch, also employs the formal templates of the sonnet and the fugue but does so by reprising the very short line he had honed in Breaking News. Once again individual poems echo or rework phrases and images, making frequent references to eyebright, a plant associated with memory and clear sight. Every third poem takes its title from the final line of a preceding poem, creating a half-submerged narrative chain that Carson overlays with a diverse and fragmentary set of epistemological meditations. Read from cover to cover, the volume becomes an echo-chamber recycling themes of war and surveillance, illness and loss, memory and forgetting, as Carson pursues a restless nocturnal meditation upon the fallible resources of language. For Michael Hinds, On the Night Watch communicates an impression ‘that words never stop resounding, no matter how unadorned they may appear.32 Indeed, while the poems’ brevity and terseness seem to promise immediacy, their syntactical ambiguities and cryptic simplicity demand the reader’s careful attention not just to what is said but also ‘what/ remains unspoken’ (ONW, 109).