PoetryAs William Carlos Williams so famously demonstrated, the very short poetic line demands of its practitioners a constant vigilance. It is an illusion to think that its success consists merely of the aesthetic arrangement of chopped-up prose. Like the subtleties of a watercolour, its feints and breaks, its pulses and double-takes, distinguish the form and create its palette of effects.
William Carlos is not the first American Williams to impact on Ciaran Carson's formal virtuosity. In earlier ground-breaking volumes, from Belfast Confetti onwards, Carson deployed a protean long line partly indebted to the contemporary American poet, C.K. Williams - whose own work descends from Whitman's ample line and "the fourteener" measure used by Renaissance poets.
Now, in Breaking News, Carson makes a dramatic new formal swerve towards the speech rhythms and imagism of the very short line, with a nod (in the figure of the Lagan blackbird) to the ancient Irish tradition of poetic glosses. The result is never less than technically superb: a surefooted, supple, high-octane fusion of the sonic and the swift, by which each poem's few images bring to life the wide-angled small.
The collection has four juxtaposed strands. About half of the 40 poems are Irish, mostly Troubles or post-Troubles vignettes of Belfast. Another quarter, written in the same micro-line, and spliced around the Belfast poems, consist of battlefield snapshots of the Crimean war. As if to highlight the vicarious thread running through the collection, three poems are based on paintings (by Gericault, Goya and Hopper), whilst one is a Belfast re-imagining of a famous William Carlos Williams poem on his native city. The final strand is comprised of two longer poems written in more expansive measures, The Indian Mutiny and The War Correspondent, in which Carson draws, often verbatim, on the war dispatches from India and Crimea by the celebrated Anglo-Irish journalist, William Howard Russell (1820-1907).
The overall effect of the Belfast imagism is to suggest, firstly, the interconnection between political spin and military power; and secondly, the interplay of the politics of surveillance and the endless surveillance of the social world entailed by politics. The book may be a kind of poetic version of the snapshot imagism of modern politics and media, an era that began with the mass journalism of the Victorian era. On this reading, the effectiveness of each poem depends to a degree on the overall fit of the volume; even as the contrast between the spareness of the micro-poems and the lushness derived from Russell's war prose marks out an historical evolution.
For readers familiar with the city's cultural ghosts, the conflation of Belfast and Crimea will have a certain vestigial logic. Like the rest of 19th-century Ireland, Belfast was implicated in empire; in its Anglican churches, British regimental colours "hang/ tattered by/ the moth/ or shot". In Exile, the book's controlling template is made manifest:
I walk
the smouldering
dark streets
Sevastapol
Crimea
Inkerman
Odessa
Balkan
Lucknow
Belfast
is many
places then
as now
all lie
in ruins.
But is Belfast really so easily connected to all these places through a rehearsal of street names or is this mainly a matter of crafting comparisons? One sees the point - imperial emigration once, post-colonial immigration now - even as one queries the slight hibernicising embrace, and the subsequent note of Joycean preservation:
it is
as much
as I can do
to save
even one
from oblivion.
For this reader, that is not the only doubt dogging this inventive book. Unlike the low-key beauty of stand-alone lyrics such as Minus and Wake, where do some of the other shards of Troubles imagery go beyond reminding us of the authenticity (or glamour?) bestowed by violence on Belfast, and the poet's imaginative connection to it?
I wonder too about the vicarious depiction of the Crimean war. Is it somehow easier - less apparently problematic - to write poems about old dead wars with an historic Irish overseas connection (Crimea, the Boer war, the world wars) than contemporary horrors, whose actual resonance for the present island may be greater, as with the Yugoslav catastrophe? In the self- consciously painterly quality of much of Carson's Crimean imagery ("a swathe/ of honeyed light/ cuts through/ the gunsmoke"), is there not a danger of aestheticising war by rendering its externals only, and treating things military as an automatic patent of authenticity?
Such doubts, more historical than poetic, are crystallised for me in the two longer imperial poems. Each is a tour de force of proxy pyrotechnics - a dazzling technical demonstration of poetry's debt to the prose genius, and vice versa. In both, the essential ugliness of empire grimaces forth from a borrowed language of orientalism and military spectacle.
Nonetheless, this use of Russell-by-proxy partakes of some drawbacks of Victorian language concerning empire. The final impression from the seven sections of The War Correspondent, each depicting a scene from the Crimean campaign, is a kind of confusion of visualisation, like one of those overcrowded and tumultuous period canvases of the Levant. The rich pell-mell of orientalist imagery, toy-soldier pageantry and explicit floweriness somehow takes us away from the horror.
One begins to distrust Russell's heavy-brush voraciousness, as if he had been too caught up in his linguistic surfaces, too detached from the inner truth of his tableaux and panoramas; raising, in turn, the question: does language drive meaning, or meaning language? Carson is ostensibly of the former school; whereas, say, Orwell was not. Still, no major writer can escape that dialectic.
The depiction of war has its scruples and suffering its reticence. It may be that this is Carson's underlying point; his Belfast micro-poems suggest as much. If so, it is a shrewd parting-shot, undercutting his alter-ego's pyrotechnics and escaping - though perhaps not entirely - the very thing he has critiqued.
Chris Agee's latest collection of poems is First Light (Dedalus, 2003). He is editor of the Belfast journal, Irish Pages, and is currently an international writing fellow at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Breaking News By Ciaran Carson The Gallery Press, 74pp, €11.40pbk, €17.50hbk