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This article explores Ciaran Carson’s engagement with print and television news media. While critics have emphasised the news’s importance to Breaking News (2003), this article argues that the collection extends the journalistic concerns of Carson’s earlier work. By analysing coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict and drawing on the Carson archives at Emory, University, Atlanta, it shows that Carson’s responses to the news remain interested in the “blurring” of different reports, images, and narratives. In critiquing “objectivity” as a journalistic value, Carson’s work explores the tendency of news stories to shift and change, suggesting that no account can offer more than “the half of it.” Alongside this, the article explores how Carson’s senses of place and event respond to media saturation. Life in Belfast during the Troubles, his work realises, is often itself a “blur” of different stories, with even the most ordinary experiences coloured by the consumption of news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the publication of three books directly addressing the intersection between text and visual artworks — Fishing for Amber (1999), Shamrock Tea (2001), Still Life (2019) — Ciaran Carson’s work has not been given significant attention in terms of his contribution to the subject of ekphrastic poetry in Irish literature. Several texts, on the other hand, have been devoted to discussing his work in relation to the spatial, place-bound quality of his poetry and prose. This article seeks to bridge this gap by reframing the ekphrastic mode as the intimate but illusory coming into contact between author, reader, and work. Using the dual role of the ‘study’ as both a practice drawing and a private room, this paper argues Ciaran Carson’s final collection, Still Life, represents a new interpretation of how intimate connections in domestic spaces can be portrayed in Northern Irish literature.

Despite the publication of three books directly addressing the intersection between text and visual artworks — Fishing for Amber (1999), Shamrock Tea (2001), Still Life (2019) — Ciaran Carson’s work has not been given significant attention in terms of his contribution to the subject of ekphrastic poetry in Irish literature. Several texts, on the other hand, have been devoted to discussing his work in relation to the spatial, place-bound quality of his poetry and prose. This article seeks to bridge this gap by reframing the ekphrastic mode as the intimate but illusory coming into contact between author, reader, and work. Using the dual role of the ‘study’ as both a practice drawing and a private room, this paper argues Ciaran Carson’s final collection, Still Life, represents a new interpretation of how intimate connections in domestic spaces can be portrayed in Northern Irish literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay explores Paul Muldoon’s elegy for the fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson with a view to showing that “The Triumph” seeks to evoke a ground where political, cultural and religious polarities are destabilized. As the various intertextual allusions in the poem are traced, it is argued that Muldoon seeks to revise the notion of the Irish shibboleths that, as the poem puts it, “are meant to trip you up.” In lieu of this linguistic and political slipperiness, “The Triumph” situates Carson’s protean invocations of Belfast and traditional Irish music as the new shibboleths of collectivity.

The essay explores Paul Muldoon's elegy for the fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson with a view to showing that "The Triumph" seeks to evoke a ground where political, cultural and religious polarities are destabilized. As the various intertextual allusions in the poem are traced, it is argued that Muldoon seeks to revise the notion of the Irish shibboleths that, as the poem puts it, "are meant to trip you up." In lieu of this linguistic and political slipperiness, "The Triumph" situates Carson's protean invocations of Belfast and traditional Irish music as the new shibboleths of collectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[in]visible belfast was a research-driven indie alternate reality game (ARG) that ran for 6 weeks during the spring of 2011 in Belfast and was subsequently adapted, 5 years later into a fictional documentary for BBC Radio 4. The ARG is a participatory and dispersed narrative, which the audience play through. The text expands outward across both physical and digital platforms to create a mystery for the players using everyday platforms. The ARG is a product of media convergence and at its heart transmedial, defined by its complexity and modes of participation. The fictional radio documentary which remediated the ARG into a more simple linear structure, but possibly a more complex narrative form, retells parts of the story for new audiences. The premise of [in]visible belfast – the game and later the documentary – is itself an adaptation of writer Ciaran Carson's novel The Star Factory (1997): a postmodern adventure through the complex psychogeography of Belfast. A trail through the labyrinthine text, which paints the history of Belfast in poetic prose. This article will map the concept's journey from novel to game to radio, contextualising its development within its political and urban landscape and charting the remediation of the narratives as they fold out across multiple media and complex story arches. The article will draw together ideas from previous publications on ARG, transmediality and complex textualities from the authors and reflect on the textual trajectories that the remediation of the narrative has taken from the original book, through the ARG, into the radio documentary. Building upon recent approaches from environmental philosopher Tim Morton and games theorist Ian Bogost, the authors argue that Belfast's history propels medial adaptations of a particular kind, characterised by a 'flat' ontology of space and time and a sort of diffuse and dark urban experience for designers/producers and players/listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Ecomusicology' is a developing field that looks to explore the interface between modern eco-theory and a range of historical and contemporary musical phenomena. Generated as it is by a country in which ideas of space/place and ideas of music feature particularly strongly, it is likely that Irish cultural history will resonate powerfully in relation to an ecomusicological perspective. The early work of Van Morrison is rooted in the hippie counter-culture of the 1960s, one principal strand of which concerned environmental despoliation and the need for some form of re-enchantment with nature. By contrast, the 'Celtic Music' phenomenon of the 1990s was brought to its artistic (and financial) apogee by the Donegal singer Enya. Drawing on techniques initially developed by family members in Clannad, Enya evinced a form of mystical Celticism which, even as it harked back to earlier versions, sang to a quasi-environmentalist discourse embedded within the contemporary style known as 'New Age'. The essay will conclude with a brief description of the other areas of Irish music that would be amenable to an ecomusicological audit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of memory informing Northern Irish poetry published after the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998, a period during which an uncertain and ambiguous peace process has played out. It argues that the preoccupation of many poets with practices of remembering and forgetting suggests that, on a cultural level at least, Northern Ireland’s explosive past has yet to be successfully decommissioned and consigned to the archive of history. Treating the idea of an achieved peace and its anticipated economic dividend with scepticism or irony, many of the poems considered exhibit profoundly complex, distorted conceptions of time and temporality, insistently registering historical occlusions and ruptures in the fabric of social memory. Drawing upon theories of memory and peace developed in the work of Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, I argue that contemporary poetry from Northern Ireland contests the equation of peace with a culture of amnesia. When memory is commodified as nostalgia or heritage it becomes impossible either to confront the legacies of the past or to remember the future. Attending to questions of form as well as a number of recurrent thematic concerns, I seek to illustrate the various ways in which Northern Irish poets engage with such pressing dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of musical traditions on Ciaran Carson’s work has long been noted. Carson’s use of fugue forms, especially in For All We Know (2008), however, suggests a different, and perhaps more political, relation to form than can be found in his earlier collections. As can be seen with comparison to the work of Paul Celan, Carson uses fugue to navigate through what Pierre Nora calls the ‘fundamental opposition’ between memory and history. The doubling and repetition inherent to fugal forms provide a way to reconceptualise the past, highlighting the interrelation of multiple corresponding voices. Carson, like Celan, uses fugue to approach historical moments that resist language, and in so doing reconceptualises the demands the past makes on the present, and the ability of language to reflect those demands.

Ciaran Carson is a renowned Northern Irish poet with a distinguished record of translating poetry from Irish, Italian and French. This article focuses on his translation practice as evidenced in his three volumes of French poetry in translation: sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud; prose poems by Rimbaud; and poems by Jean Follain. Guided by the music, the matter, and the linguistic and ontological going-beyond of the originals, Carson variously ‘adapts’ prose poems to a rhyming alexandrine format, makes explicit use of derivation, shifts spatio-temporal perspective, and ‘doubles’ his French translations with English originals. Carson’s approach of ‘fetching’ poems from ‘elsewhere’ is assessed in the light of Meschonnic’s poetics of translation, which would define the overarching objective as producing new poems in English which do in English what the originals do in French. The analysis of Carson’s new poems is also informed by conceptualizations of creativity and originality arising from research in cognitive science, literary studies and critical theory. Carson’s practice of working under constraints suggested by the original poems and exploiting possibilities offered by and between the two languages leads to an expressive plurality that unsettles notions of source and target language. His translation artefacts and commentaries are examined for the light they shed on originality and derivation; writing and translating; the subjectivity of the translator; and the relationship between original poem and new poem.

Ciaran Carson's writing plays with and renders strange all kinds of literary and generic classifications. The subject of numerous short critical accounts, a monograph and at least one collection of essays, his work, especially the poetry, has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention. 'After Carson' offers a hybridic, 'creative-critical' response to a genre-busting idiom. Focussing on just two of Carson's works, the well-known and much-discussed Belfast Confetti (1989), and the complex but less carefully read prose work The Star Factory (1997), the formal self-consciousness of this treatment is intended to problematise the conceptual and textual bounds of conventional literary scholarship. The intention is to figure, as well as justify, the disruption of conventional linear argument with the help of the subversive energies to be discovered in collision, lapse, detour, ambush, and / or other kinds of discursive misconduct. Informed partly by dissatisfaction with most theories of reading, our critique is particularly interested in how three different kinds of reading can be shown to complicate both their subject and each other. Firstly, it casts the reader's relationship with Carson in the paradoxical, counter-conclusive terms of 'anacoluthon': a rhetorical figure of errant predication (a following which does not follow). Secondly it argues that Carson's work reflexively interrogates the will to distinguish between creative and critical modes, rendering any act of interpretation productively unstable. Finally, in its co-authorship, the account knowingly doubles - at once destabilising and deferring - the authorising singularity of the critical voice, suspending a habitually hegemonic 'I' between our differently contextualised, differently gendered signatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ciaran Carson is a renowned Northern Irish poet with a distinguished record of translating poetry from Irish, Italian and French. This article focuses on his translation practice as evidenced in his three volumes of French poetry in translation: sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud; prose poems by Rimbaud; and poems by Jean Follain. Guided by the music, the matter, and the linguistic and ontological going-beyond of the originals, Carson variously 'adapts' prose poems to a rhyming alexandrine format, makes explicit use of derivation, shifts spatio-temporal perspective, and 'doubles' his French translations with English originals. Carson's approach of 'fetching' poems from 'elsewhere' is assessed in the light of Meschonnic's poetics of translation, which would define the overarching objective as producing new poems in English which do in English what the originals do in French. The analysis of Carson's new poems is also informed by conceptualizations of creativity and originality arising from research in cognitive science, literary studies and critical theory. Carson's practice of working under constraints suggested by the original poems and exploiting possibilities offered by and between the two languages leads to an expressive plurality that unsettles notions of source and target language. His translation artefacts and commentaries are examined for the light they shed on originality and derivation; writing and translating; the subjectivity of the translator; and the relationship between original poem and new poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how Ciaran Carson's For All We Know (2008) adds to other disciplinary approaches to the challenges of re-presenting the past. The representation of history is a controversial field, as much of the radical tradition of history debates in Marx, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva indicates. Controversies over history are also prevalent in Belfast and Northern Ireland where history seems to have intervened upon the life of individual people more brutally and insistently than in most other places in the Western world in the latter decades of the last century. Carson is one of the many acclaimed poets who try to come to terms with the almost incomprehensible historical predicament of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. What is the poet to write about in times of murder and mayhem? Why? How? How does poetry relate to the representations of the past and the emergence into unknown futures? Carson has endured the tragedies, the turmoil, and their bearings upon the peace-emerging society in Belfast throughout his whole life. For All We Know constitutes a historical document, which in its poetic creativity and formal strategies, supplements other attempts to account for life in Belfast and Northern Ireland during the Troubles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the understanding that postcolonialism is linked to power structures, and that surveillance activity is a means for knowledge acquisition, this article considers different ways of seeing/being seen as avenues for gaining control. It addresses such notions with reference to Northern Ireland, a region in the UK confused over its colonial/postcolonial identity, and takes into consideration its geopolitical position as well as its internal complex web of sociopolitical relations. It argues that control occurs at both state and popular culture levels, and that mass media involve a different kind of colonization – which can be seen as psychological. Advancing technologies allow for different kinds of invasion/occupation, and technomediated modes of modern living come complete with adapted exclusions and inclusions. These issues are explored through analysis of video installations by Derry artist Willie Doherty, and with reference to Belfast writer Ciaran Carson’s essay “Intelligence” fromBelfast Confetti– both Doherty and Carson focus on “watching” in the (conflicted/occupied) cityscape and the way it affects perception, language and identity. These issues of control and status are discussed here in the light of Foucault’s theorizing of the panopticon and Bhabha’s notions of mimicry and ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘Only the city’, argues Ciaran Carson, ‘can be a map of the city’. Carson, writing of a ‘Troubled’ Belfast, suggests that the immanence of violence in a conflict zone leaves landmarks contingent, potentially temporary, alarmingly open to being ‘swallowed in the maw of time’. This uncertainty collapses optic (and the map's pan-optic) logic: less a legible landscape than a ‘demolition city’, Belfast seems a shape-shifter of sorts, an urban palimpsest where past haunts present and ‘streets and shops [are the stuff of] memory’. Carson's poetry responds to this injunction, plotting Belfast's ‘dangerous potentiality’ by tracing the epistemological exhaustion of the visual.  It also, however, provisionally re-maps the city in and through sound, considering place in acoustic space.  While Carson's poem ‘Question Time’ peremptorily pronounces that ‘[m]aps and street directories are suspect’, his ‘Queen's Gambit’ charts Belfast's whirrings, tickings, hissings, and rumblings in their stead. Carson therefore offers a ‘semiotics of sound’ with which locals navigate the otherwise slippery city. The tin can, for instance, that rolls down Balaclava Street whenever trouble is in the offing, serves as an aural alert – though ‘thousands hear it, no one s[ees] it’ – guiding city travel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Considered as a whole the work of Ciaran Carson is perhaps distinguished above all by its sheer miscellaneity, but within this catholic remit of interests the city of Belfast continues to occupy a central place, manifesting itself in complex and various forms. Disclosing a dialectic of recollection and revision at its centre, Carson's work balances a desire to record everything about the city, and thereby to know Belfast in its totality, against the necessity of knowing it in terms of its provisional details and contingent multiplicity. This fundamental tension can be explored through his variations upon the theme of walking in the city, a mode of perceiving and navigating urban space that precludes any privileged position of detached objectivity in favour of active engagement in the writing and re-writing of the city-text. Moreover, I argue that whilst Carson's writing contains unusally sophisticated representations of Belfast as both labyrinth and panopticon, walking in the city also implies for him an utopian spatial politics through which resistance to state surveillance and paramilitary terror might be both imagined and effected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the applicability of postcolonial theory to Irish culture and history. It develops the concept of multiple rhythms or temporalities of social struggle for which only that of nationalism is determined punctually by the struggle for the state. The domination of Irish historiography by state-oriented narratives occludes the histories and the formal or organizational aspects of other forms of social movement, such that the postcolonial project is directed simultaneously towards the mapping of such alternative movements and to the critique of statist historiographies, whether imperialist, nationalist or 'revisionist'. Where postcolonial theory has tended to emphasize the 'hybrid' nature of colonial cultures, this essay prefers to focus on the productive interface between the incommensurable social and cultural formations of colonial modernity and colonized non-modernity. At this interface emerge continually both new subaltern social formations and practices, which cannot be understood as 'traditional' and new forms of colonial state institution that are summoned into being by anti-colonial practices, for which the model of an advanced state coming to bear on a backward population is clearly inadequate. The essay draws from the history of agrarian movements in Ireland and banditry in the Philippines and from contemporary techniques of state surveillance and resistance to it in Northern Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]