Ciaran Carson - Critical Perspective

Critical Perspective

Carson has managed an unusual marriage in his work between the Irish vernacular story-telling tradition and the witty elusive mock-pedantic scholarship of Paul Muldoon. (Muldoon also combines both modes). In a trivial sense, what differentiates them is line length. As Carol Rumens has pointed out 'Before the 1987 publication of The Irish for No, Carson was a quiet, solid worker in the groves of Heaney. But at that point he rebelled into language, set free by a rangy "long line" that has been attributed variously to the influence of C. K. Williams, Louis MacNeice and traditional music'.

Carson's first book was The New Estate (1976). In the ten years before The Irish for No (1987) he perfected a new style which effects a unique fusion of traditional story telling with postmodernist devices. The first poem in The Irish for No, the tour-de-force 'Dresden' parades his new technique. Free ranging allusion is the key. The poem begins in shabby bucolic:

'And as you entered in, a bell would tinkle in the empty shop, a musk

Of soap and turf and sweets would hit you from the gloom.'

It takes five pages to get to Dresden, the protagonist having joined the RAF as an escape from rural and then urban poverty. In Carson everything is rooted in the everyday, so the destruction of Dresden evokes memories of a particular Dresden shepherdess he had on the mantelpiece as a child and the destruction is described in terms of 'an avalanche of porcelain, sluicing and cascading'.

Like Muldoon's, Carson's work is intensely allusive. In much of his poetry he has a project of sociological scope: to evoke Belfast in encyclopaedic detail. The second half of The Irish for No was called Belfast Confetti (1990) and this idea expanded to become his next book. The Belfast of the Troubles is mapped with obsessive precision and the language of the Troubles is as powerful a presence as the Troubles themselves. The title "Belfast Confetti" signals this:

'Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks,

Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type...'

In his next book, First Language, (1993) that won the T. S. Eliot Prize, language has become the subject. There are translations of Ovid, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Carson is deeply influenced by Louis MacNeice and he includes a poem called 'Bagpipe Music'. What it owes to the original is its rhythmic verve. With his love of dense long lines it is not surprising he is drawn to classical poetry and Baudelaire. In fact, the rhythm of 'Bagpipe Music' seems to be that of an Irish jig, on which subject he is an expert (his book about Irish music Last Night's Fun (1996) is regarded as a classic. To be precise, the rhythm is that of a "single jig" or "slide."):

'blah dithery dump a doodle scattery idle fortunoodle.'

Carson then entered a prolific phase in which the concern for language liberated him into a new creativity. Opera Etcetera (1996) had a set of poems on letters of the alphabet and another series on Latin tags such as 'Solvitur Ambulando' and 'Quod Erat Demonstrandum' and another series of translations form the Romanian poet Stefan Augustin Doinas. Translation became a key concern, The Alexandrine Plan (1998) featured sonnets by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé rendered into alexandrines. Carson's penchant for the long line found a perfect focus in the 12-syllable alexandrine line. He also published The Twelfth of Never (1999), sonnets on fanciful themes:

'This is the land of the green rose and the lion lily, /

Ruled by Zeno's eternal tortoises and hares, /

where everything is metaphor and simile'.

The Ballad of HMS Belfast (1999) collected his Belfast poems.