An unrestrained imagination wandering in constrained spaces.

Dillon, Brian

ELMER KENNEDY-ANDREWS, EDITOR

Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays

Four Courts Press, 2009

IN THE INTERVIEW WITH Ciaran Carson that opens this book, the Belfast-based writer expresses his appreciation for Paul Celan: "I don't pretend to know what the poems mean, but I'm astonished by their immense linguistic depths, their venturing into a world which seems to use language to go beyond language or beyond our normal understanding of it" (16). Carson's response to Celan might be shared by readers of some of Carson's own poetry and prose.

Plumbing the "linguistic depths," wielding language playfully, compiling lists that blur the distinction between fact and fancy, such intentions seem to dominate the interest of Carson in a number of his works, leaving some readers in search of meaning perplexed, even feeling they have been toyed with by the poly-lingual author. Readers of his work risk overdosing on instability.

This attribute extends from mere wordplay--"We'd flounder on/the decks like halibut," says the speaker about his fellow sailors in "The Ballad of HMS Belfast"--to the full-length narrative of Shamrock Tea, a kind of mutant novel. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews' essay on the "art of getting lost" summarizes in a tidy way the story-telling intricacies of one episode in Shamrock Tea: the character Maeterlink, who shares some qualities with the literary figure of the same name, retells "his uncle Maurice's retelling of the man in the pub's retelling of the story of Zadig, which is Voltaire's retelling of Walpole's retelling of [according to Carson] 'a French translation of an Italian translation made by an Armenian of an alleged Persian original'" (237). Fortunately, many of the essays in this collection examine the structures of this playful quality, explain motives for it, and lucidly interrogate individual poems and prose passages in order to illuminate potential meanings. The essays in this first book-length critical study of Carson demonstrate that the body of his work, created over four decades, deserves such careful attention.

Statements gleaned from earlier interviews with Carson serve as springboards for the interpretive claims of many of the critics included here, as do prior essays on Carson, by Neil Corcoran and Edna Langley, for example. Readers who proceed with caution when a collection of critical essays opens with an interview with the subject author out of a concern that the questions posed may be too deferential and yield unhelpful responses will be pleased with the give-and-take of this discussion. Kennedy-Andrews' interview, conducted via email over a number of months, yields intriguing gems about Carson, including his religious background, his literary influences (and the "anxiety" those influences prompt), the sparks that begin the construction of a poem, and his reliance upon hyperspace. Carson's self-disclosure inadvertently anticipates the focus of a number of the essays that follow.

For example, Patricia Horton's effort to "read tradition" in Carson's poetry locates correspondences between authors named in the interview (Keats, most prominently) and some not mentioned by the poet, including the Confessions of an English opium-eater author. "De Quincey shares with Keats a concern with altered states of consciousness, but is linked more particularly to Carson in his concern with the instability of the urban landscape and of the subject within it. For de Quincey the city is both a territory of gothic nightmare and a space of endless possibility and fluidity" (165). The evidence from The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti, major works from the late 1980s (and commented upon in this collection more than any two other Carson volumes), supports Horton's provocative claim. Curiously, in his interview, Carson refers to the "familiar dread" of "a recurrent anxiety dream in which 1 am trapped between the Falls Road and the Shankill, or trapped on the wrong side, which to me is the Shankill: a labyrinth of side streets, cul-de-sacs, fences, rivers, factory complexes, dams. It seems inescapably ingrained in my experience, in my psyche" (25). Whether his dreams provoke his poems or the composition of his poems provoke his dreams, the correspondence established with De Quincey (sans the opium addiction, presumably) sounds apt.

A number of these essays investigate other influences on Carson, such as the long-line form Carson admired in the poems of the American C.K. Williams and adapted to his own purposes, along with the seemingly casual reliance upon conversational idioms, pub talk, and digressions with no center to return to. Peter Denman's essay concentrates on formal concerns. After providing a brief history of the long-line form, he analyzes Carson's variations on this typically loose structure (which is relied upon so much in The Irish for No, Belfast Confetti, First Language, and Opera et cetera). Rather than form tight syntactic units, his lines spill over, "and use of enjambment extends down to the level of words. Few poets use the hyphen more frequently than Carson. His hyphenation is not so much to provide compound words as to break down the difference that defines the individual lexical items. In furtherance of this, he searches for interruptions and interpolations within the line unit. Sentence endings, parentheses, ellipses, punctuate the line so that its autonomy is resisted" (41). As the lines run on, the potential meanings run off in various directions. "In Carson's poetry," Denman asserts, "the suggested meaning lies not outside and around a single image, as in Pound's formulation for Imagist poetry, but is located somewhere between two or more images that become the co-ordinates of a conceptual space" (34).

In his examination of the influence of three American poets on Carson--C.K. Williams, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost--Ciaran O'Neill illustrates his discussion with "Cocktails" (from The Irish for No), a breathless narrative poem of how one fast car avoided a British check-point during the Belfast "Troubles." The car "disappeared before the Brits knew what hit /them. So/The story went: we were in the Whip and Saddle bar of the Europa." The abrupt line break after "So" implies "an ironic disclaimer": who knows what can be believed? "Cocktail," O'Neill argues, "is a critique of the cultural normality of voicing meaningless buffering rhetoric in the avoidance of moral consequence" (203); this insight applies as well to other poems in The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti dependent upon loose talk ("Judgement," "Queen's Gambit," "Narrative in black and white," to note only three).

Like the speaker of "Loaf" (Belfast Confetti), Carson seeks the "in-between-ness" of meaning, not exactly one definable meaning or another, and not exactly both meanings at once. As Stan Smith states in "Cruising to the podes: Ciaran Carson's virtual realities," binary oppositions break down and disperse in Carson's work: "Antitheses and oppositions figure regularly in his writing only to be deconstructed into plurality" (113). A number of the authors of this collection investigate this intriguing feature of Carson's work. In his contribution, Eammon Hughes lists many oppositions, including these: "a commitment to the here and now as against an obsession with history and memory; an almost pedantic attention to detail and fact as against frequently phantasmagorical narratives and an acknowledgement of the power of imagination; images of imprisonment and closure as against the endless voyage of the flaneur; the city as known territory as against the need to be lost; the city as site of alienation as against its lively speech community" (88). Wisely, Hughes ends his list with "and so on," aware, presumably, that list-making, cataloging, piling up names, feature as a stylistic tic in Carson's work. The critic need not compete with Carson.

Tim Hancock's "Ciaran Carson: the spy in the superior turret" defines the oppositions in the Carson persona with these terms: sophistication and primitivism. Hancock provides evidence of the creative tensions evident in Carson's writing on Irish traditional music, the pull towards scholarly documentation and the pull towards spontaneous performance, the educated man and the hedonist, sometimes meeting in the same sentence, as illustrated by passages from the prose of Last Night's Fun. In his close reading of one poem from Opera et cetera, "Auditque vocatus Apollo" ("Apollo hears when invoked"), a poem that begins straight-forwardly--"We were climbing Parnassus"--Hancock inspects Carson's split aesthetic identity: his sustained interpretation is a model of clarity. Other authors in this collection who pause to examine with care a specific poem or prose passage (such as Smith on "Last Orders" from Belfast Confetti and "The Ballad of HMS Belfast" from First Language, Kennedy-Andrews on The Star Factory, to note only a few examples) allow the reader to gauge the accuracy of their critical insights and emphasize the complex richness of Carson's work. (The index to this volume will prove helpful for those seeking responses to individual poems.)

While other readers might share my desire for more passages of extended close reading (particularly because Carson's longer narrative poems seem especially ripe for extended commentary), such a desire is not based on the hope that even the most skillful reader may arrive at some core of meaning. As Hughes states in regard to an attempt to unravel the multiple narrative strands of the long poem "Queen's Gambit," "the unraveled stories are no more the poem than the strands of a rope are the rope" (96). Surprisingly, Carson's Breaking News (2003) disrupts his reliance on long-line narrative and lyric poems with its stripped-down form of thin lines, stanzas of few syllables, and a near absence of punctuation. O'Neill concentrates on the debt to William Carlos Williams. Michael McAteer's essay on "commodification" provides insightful readings on a number of the ultra-terse poems of Breaking News and their varied presentation of objects (as well as the "power objects exercise" (131 ) in Carson's earlier poetry). David Wheatley self-consciously questions the theoretical risk any critic confronts when facing such short-line poems: "is it possible to subject these poems to the rigours of a critical reading without violating their spirit?" (50) So much depends upon the presence of white space surrounding the words of these poems, and the meaning shifts when determined by whether a reader accepts or rejects enjambment. Wheatley. asserts, "In typography, orphans and widows are small clusters of text that look abandoned at the foot or head of a page, but with its single-word lines Breaking News creates a world of orphaned meaning, each word cut off from the next, ... and by extension [suggests] the latent death of the lyric form itself" (51).

Seeking only playfulness, a reader may find a number of Carson's works booby-trapped with dark seriousness. Smith asserts, "Carson is not much enamoured of the simple dualities of identity politics" (113). For example, "Carson's virtual HMS Belfast is manned, in apparently unsectarian fashion, by 'Both Catestants and Protholics', the playful transposition suggesting the interchangeability of these opposing creeds but also, perhaps, the fatuousness of their antithesis" (110). Playfulness collides with the violence of the "Troubles" in many of Carson's poems from The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti, such as "The Mouth," which opens with the line "There was this head had this mouth he kept shooting off." Smith comments, "The poem concludes, chillingly, with the literal application of the metaphor, the indiscreet gossiper's face blown off by (wordplay insinuates) Provisional gunmen. Carson here makes a literal application, too, of his usually! playful rhetorical trick, the face of the murdered man reconstructed, by back formation, from the tooth marks in the last apple he ever ate by-the malapropism a final insult to 'what he used to be'-the 'Forscenic lab'" (115).

The speakers in many of Carson's writings live under surveillance in zones Of trickle-down suspicion, observed by the rotating cameras and the helicopters overhead, the ears attentive to clues overheard in pub talk: this concentrates the minds of the speakers. This volume's final essay by Allan, Gillis clearly indicates that Carson's high-alert response to such panoptic-like Oversight persists in his yet-to-be-published prose works The pen friend and X + Y = K; Gillis whets the appetite of the reader: with his concise summaries and commentary on these texts. While these two manuscripts add to the "playful erudition" Carson's readers expect to discover, they are distinguished from his earlier work by being more "plot-driven" (255-256).

The thirteen critics who contribute to this collection perceive Carson's work through a variety of theoretical lenses. Kennedy-Andrews accurately generalizes that Carson "represents a challenge to the conventional discourses that govern our understanding and representation of history and identity" (247). The critics in this volume rise to the challenge and substantially expand the discussion about not only Carson's work but contemporary Irish literature.

--Montana State University-Billings