Breaking News

"No, not really, but I do think he’s the archetypal poet of urban Belfast at that time. His earlier work is characterised by this long information-led rolling line, very much influenced by the American poet C K Williams, and in the first half of Breaking News it’s entirely the opposite: tiny poems, skeletal poems often comprised of only a few words and often with one word lines, so just the audacity to reinvent your own technique like that is really impressive. The first poems in the book could be read as Belfast poems, lots of them are set in the Crimea but lots of them are set here, and I think the sparsity of them is almost a formal comment on the aftermath of the Troubles, post-ceasefire Belfast: what gets left behind – remnants, debris, all those kinds of things. “I tell my students, ‘Don’t put any abstract nouns into your poems. Just write about things you can count or put in a wheelbarrow’.” Then I love the way that is counterpoised with that fantastic take-off sequence at the end of the book based on the actual newspaper reports from the first embedded war correspondent, William Howard Russell, in Crimea. Ciaran Carson has taken the details of those reports – they were really shocking when they were read at home, the incredible shock not only of the violence itself but the devastation wreaked on civilians and the lack of care for the soldiers in terms of really poor equipment and really poor hospital care. I just think it’s a superbly unified book which both comes out of previous poetic concerns and extends them and builds on them. It’s my favourite Ciaran Carson collection. Yes, he’s an expert in Irish music and before he reads poetry he plays his whistle! You see his music, especially in the build-up rhythm of those poems like ‘Gallipoli’, those long lines and that cascade of terrifying detail. The way he delivers the final line: ‘I have not even begun to describe Gallipoli…’"