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Ciaran Carson Space, Place, Writing ciaran carson space, place, writing LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES 58 Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 1 16/08/2010 09:38:40 Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 2 16/08/2010 09:38:40 CIARAN CARSON SPACE, PLACE, WRITING NEAL ALEXANDER LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 3 16/08/2010 09:38:40 First published 2010 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2010 Neal Alexander The right of Neal Alexander to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-478-0 cased Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 4 16/08/2010 09:38:40 Contents Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations ix Introduction 1 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 Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 5 16/08/2010 09:38:40 Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 6 16/08/2010 09:38:40 Acknowledgements This book has been in the works for several years andI 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 conver- sations 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: Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 7 16/08/2010 09:38:40 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. Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 8 16/08/2010 09:38:40 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 Irish Traditional Music (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1986) LE The Lost Explorer (Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1978) LNF Last Night’s 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) ix Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 9 16/08/2010 09:38:40 Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 10 16/08/2010 09:38:40 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.1 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, Alexander, Ciaran Carson.indd 1 16/08/2010 09:38:40 ciaran carson: space, place, writing 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.
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