Ciaran Carson: Breaking News / Justin Quinn: Fuselage
Ciaran Carson, Breaking News, 74pp A5, ISBN 1 85235 339 2; Justin Quinn, Fuselage, 62pp A5, ISBN 1 85235 329 5. Both published by The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland.
Ciaran Carson's new collection Breaking News is a remarkable achievement of unity in contrast. From tiny, perfect poems like Campaign:
shot
the horse fell
a crow
plucked the eyes
time passed
from a socket
crept
a butterfly
to the long sequence The War Correspondent, drawing on the writing -- often refunctioning the very words -- of the Anglo-Irish journalist William Howard Russell, Carson displays a constant, playful inventiveness in discovering new ways in which the rhythms of spoken and written (journalistic) language can come to be perceived as poetry. The influence of William Carlos Williams has been formative here: Carson's one explicit homage, The Forgotten City, is a wry act of re-visioning of an Ulster which can sometimes seem as completely defined by The Troubles as Ancient Egypt is by its funerary practices, but Williams sense of pace is everywhere in the book's shorter poems:
two men are
unloading beer
you can smell
the hops and yeast
the smouldering
heap of dung
just dropped by
one
of the great
blinkered drayhorses
The Gladstone Bar circa 1954
the peristaltic releasing of just a word or two at a time, and the line-break after an adjective in the penultimate line, all nod to Williams' red wheelbarrow or his Poem of 1930 ("As the cat / climbed over / the top of // the jamcloset / first the right / forefoot // carefully / then the hind / stepped down // into the pit of / the empty / flowerpot").
Carson's short poems mark small detonations in the surrounding silence, linked one to the other by recurrent imagery: a poem such as Breaking,
red alert
car parked
in a red
zone
about to
disintegrate
it's
oh
so quiet
you can
almost
hear it rust
deftly inserts the pregnant pause into the poem itself, while participating in a series of contrasts between images of destruction by violence and through decay: old British Army regimental colours on display in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, "tattered by / the moth // or shot", the death in old age of a man whose life was saved when his pocket-watch stopped a bullet in the trenches (this image itself linked to an account -- presumably from Russell's journalism -- of a soldier saved when a bullet "stopped / at Revelation" in his pocket bible).
The vision of Belfast as a place crippled by mutual surveillance -- where the sudden withdrawal of an army helicopter can make the poet feel as if rinsed clean, where he can awaken to the sound of a bomb-blast ("near dawn // boom // the window / trembled // bomb // I thought") but still notice the untroubled emblematic blackbird whistling in the silence that follows -- forms a counterpoint to the often astonishing poetry Carson draws out of Russell's despatches from the Crimean War. Casual beheadings by artillery fire, the reduction of people -- and above all horses -- to tatters of cloth and bone, an account which perceives the great fire which destroyed a quarter of the town of Varna largely in terms of its inconvenience to the allied forces:
both the French and we were dispossessed
of immense quantities of goods --
barrels of biscuits, nails, butter, and bullets,
carpenters' tool-boxes, hat-boxes, cages of live pullets,
polo-sticks, Lord Raglan's portable library of books,
and 19,000 pairs of soldiers' boots
the accumulation of such details, and the understated compassion and anger which Carson discovers in them, places The War Correspondent, and Breaking News as a whole, firmly in the tradition of such great Twentieth Century acts of recovery as Charles Reznikoff's Testimony.
Justin Quinn's Fuselage is a much more difficult book to approach. Quinn was born in Dublin, but now lives and works in Prague, and I wonder how much the experience of living among the speakers of another language has influenced the oddly inward quality of his verse. If it's sometimes hard to know who, or what, is being addressed in these poems, their often Mallarméan sinuousness intrigues, and rewards repeated reading:
The surface coils and rends
itself so monstrously --
swirls flicker strenuously,
then sink like sodden fronds,
as though beneath the surface
something huge had woken --
lazy, moving, limber --
for seconds, and now swerves
off sideways and back down
again into light slumber.
Quinn is not always as oblique as this, but a lingering mystery still attaches to the most straightforwardly-phrased of these poems, heightened by the sense that the poems' dialogue is at least as much with the structure of their own verse-forms (loosely iambic, usually rhymed) as with any clearly-imagined interlocutor. Any suspicion that rhyme might be driving the poems beyond Quinn's control tends to dissipate when the book is considered as a whole. In a poem on the poet's house in Prague, the house
seems
to slightly float, to flow, to give and tilt
within the greater tilt and give and flow
of Prague at large through black and gold and red --
so many millions packed into its felloe
and swung through centuries, so many dead
who added facets to the ebb and flash
and faded into what they came from: ash.
The twist in the last line, where people return to ash rather than the canonical dust, seems strange until the reader comes to the subsequent poem's mention of the self-immolation of Jan Palach, and realises one sense in which the modern Czech Republic was indeed founded on ashes.
The poems of Fuselage often work like this, building into larger structures like the sequence on sleep and awakening near the opening of the book, which bears comparison with those moments in Finnegans Wake when the dream-state lifts to reveal hints of the dreamer's physical surroundings. I don’t want to over-stress the book's complexities, as it contains a good deal of poetry that communicates at first encounter -- a sequence about a visit to London to meet old friends ("And, Jesus, get me out of here, / I think as I step on the shuttle"), and an entertaining line in consumerist irritation:
so that when you lift your hand out through the space,
the very air, of the supermarket that's faceted with choice
you'll feel that this product is for you,
that your personality is best expressed
through its purchase; it's you; you know it too
and ferry it home with the kind of consumer pride
you associate with the 1940s and '50s
when the world was a better place, and Ma
was not your Da in drag (like now)
-- which, again, becomes darker and more complex as the book proceeds (and note in passing that Quinn's poetry is as difficult to quote from as Carson's, carefully-managed long syntax often sustaining a single sentence to the length of a page). Fuselage is an important, rewarding, often baffling collection, a book I look forward to living with.
This review first appeared in Volume 93, Number 2 (Summer 2003) of Poetry Review.
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