IF some poets might be said to be experience driven, impelled into poetry by the pressure to articulate, to make sense of their experience, others are more driven by language and by form, and the poetry is invented out of the process, out of the engagement with words. Ciaran Carson belongs to the latter type in that his work is more obviously and often more violently propelled by language than that of most of his contemporaries, to the extent that the primary experience in a poem tends to be verbal, or so heavily filtered through the ecstatic apprehension and formal manipulation of words as to end up in a domain of language. The chief protagonist of any Carson poem is the language itself, the dazzle of possibility it offers to the restless and relentlessly ludic imagination. The characteristic poem proceeds by a manic associativeness, until the canvas is both illuminated and scorched by the verbal lightning.
The poems in Opera Et Cetera are shorter, more compact than in his previous collections, but just as dense. It's as if he worked by taking his luggage from a giant suitcase and cramming it into an overnight bag. The opening poem shows this compacted art at its best, and shows, too, the extraordinary distance the poet can travel within his construct. Church bells in Tallinn lead the poet into the "bronze/Dark" and a memory of Mass going with his father:
This red letter day would not be written, had I not wandered through the land of Eesti.
I asked my father how he thought it went. He said to me in Irish, Listen Eist.
Here the kind of associative play that provides the rhyme "Eesti/Eist" is unexpected and revelatory, and shows the rewards of Carson's technique. The rest of the book is dominated by sequences that play with the mechanics of inspiration, the poet choosing apparently unyielding structures as hooks to hang the poems on the letters of the alphabet, a random series of Latin phrases where the formal challenge is as much the subject as the ostensible subject matter that appears in any of the parts. The alphabet poems are technically arresting, and self consciously outlandish in the violent distortions of words demanded by the rhyme scheme "thing/Amagig" "parox/ Ysms" "pondering". The speaking voice is elusive, teasing with fast paced pseudo narratives, full of puzzles and mysteries
Invisible to radar, Stealth glided through their retina of sweep and dot.
No bleep appeared to register its
Alpha wing. The watchers were asleep or not.
The narratives stretch and snap on an elastic band of verbal inventiveness. "Letters from the Alphabet" is a bravura and often very funny performance, full of brilliant lines like "The train slowed to a halt with a sigh like Schweppes" and, in the highly orchestrated chaos of its approach, amounting also to a coherent examination of the drunkenness of things being fragmentary. The risk these poems take is that the artistry can become exhausting, leaving the reader to marvel, as it were, at the cinematography and wonder about the film.
The eleven poems of "Et Cetera", sparked off by Latin tags ("Auditque Vocatus Apollo", "Vox et Praetera Nihil", "Jacta Est Alea"), continue the comic, riddling mode, calling attention to the division between language and experience, to the voice's unstoppability "I don't know why I started this. One summer doesn't make a swallow./Suddenly, the jangling of a lyre. I cried Who's There? He says, It's me. Apollo." The shifts and elisions of language again form a central stream of images "I found George hiding in an angle of his language...". "We ended up talking about talk" "Welcome is the mat that doesn't spell itself. Words don't speak as loud as deeds" "And the story is about/To break, however garbled, from whatever source."
Reading the poems is like listening to a hypnotic monologuist. Wayward, brilliant, deliciously sculpted for the ear, often inscrutable, they pin the reader to the page even if, occasionally, they begin to daze as well as dazzle. The book isn't as richly satisfying as Belfast Confetti or First Language, and "Opera", the last and for me least engaging sequence, based on the radio operator's alphabet, shows that the method can pall.
A casualty of the bravura style is that the poems can seem interchangeable, and even if this is part of the game Carson is playing, in the end the real challenge for him might be to resist, or temper, his own brilliance and vary the tone of the voice. The versions from the Romanian of Stefan Agustin Doinas which form one section of the book, are, for instance, so close to the speaking voice of all the other poems that there isn't much sense of a distinctive imagination. The success of the Carson style can make it hard to break the habit of its obsessive exclusivity. Nonetheless, this is a hugely enjoyable collection.