MINISTERIO DE EDUCACIÓN

collections. Each has its own sound and rhythm, and each has an intricate coherence”. He goes on to note the overarching structures of the book:

[the poems] are grouped in threes on facing pages, and the book is in three sections, “Until”, “Before” and “After” – the word “until” appears in every poem in “Until”, “before” in every poem in “Before”, and “after” in each poem in “After”, drawing attention to the tripartite structure of the book, and suggesting that a greater pattern is at work.92

A further formal feature is that each group of three poems contains two poems written in five two-line stanzas, printed on the left hand page, with a fourteen-liner printed on the opposite page. The titles, while they link with the first line of their own poem, might also be linked with each other.93 While it might seem a superficial observation to note that the tripartite structure is one that is commonly found in elegy, this link is reinforced by the fact that Carson's book addresses ideas of illness, death and personal loss in perhaps the most explicit terms of his career. Graham notes that “Until Before After strives for a meaningful structure, just as its poems search for a meaning beyond life and after death”.94 While some of the poems seem to deal with the poet's own sense of mortality, such as “The hinge”, which was mentioned at the start of this chapter, the majority of the poems appear to deal with the illness of a loved one, sometimes spoken in the voice of the sick person.95 Combined with these elegiac themes are some of Carson's recurring fascinations. The poem “At death's door” provides a meditation upon language and its relation to death:96

At death's door is but

a frame

of words and not the thing itself if thing it be and if so whosoever

92 Colin Graham, “Lingering on the threshold,” The Irish Times, Saturday 22 May 2010, accessed 03/02/2011 <http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/0522/1224270852465_pf.html>. 93 For example, one group of three poems contains the titles “Not in” “That frame” “Of discord”, which

work grammatically, if elliptically, as a sentence. Indeed, the contents pages themselves, listing the titles of the poems, might almost be read as an extended version of one of Carson's short-lined poems. 94 Colin Graham, “Lingering on the threshold”.

95 Graham suggests that the book “considers the death and loss of someone who is so central to life that time and meaning become almost incomprehensible when they are gone”. While this can certainly be inferred from the poetry, Carson himself explained at a reading in Belfast in September 2010 that many of the poems were written during a period in which his wife was seriously ill, but that she had subsequently recovered. In this case, the elegiac poems would seem to be pre-emptive elegies, anticipating the loss of an ill person. This idea is more fully explored in relation to Medbh McGuckian's elegies in my final chapter.

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until it swings to has not yet gone into beyond the words (1-14)

This poem captures some of the unspeakable nature of death, a challenge faced by any elegist. The title is a commonly used cliché, and unlike his earlier reinvigoration of such “dead” metaphors in the poem “Ambition”, here Carson further deconstructs the phrase, effectively decommissioning and dismembering it. Nevertheless, Carson proves not to be overwhelmed by the daunting task of putting the unsayable into words: indeed, the poem ends emphatically with “the words”, as if the poet, having acknowledged the fact that language might be deconstructed into near meaninglessness, nevertheless determines to work with it to achieve his purpose. The placing of this poem early on in a long sequence shows that the poet is committed to his task.

A number of qualities that have come to be identified as characteristic of Carson's work are to be found in the poems of this most recent book. He acknowledges his debt to one of his predecessors, noting at the end of the collection that a number of poems are lifted verbatim from the journal of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Another poem, “An airman”, might be indebted to Yeats's elegy for Major Robert Gregory, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”.97 As well as making allusions to literary predecessors, Carson picks up on themes that have appeared in his own earlier work, and most notably, the image of the city. This is heard in the poem “It is”.98 Here, the idea of a multi-layered city with various possibilities and alternative realities, first heard in the poems of The Irish for No, is heard in conjunction with the ominous, recurrent sound of the “helicopter // beat” (6-7). The repetition of the word “city”, which appears three times in this brief poem, reinforces the suggestion that there are multiple definitions of the city, or that it has been fragmented or dismembered into multiple parts.

The book ends with a poem which might be read on three levels: either as a

straightforward work of mourning, as a pre-emptive elegy in the face of illness, or finally as a self-elegy.99 It is perhaps fitting to suggest that the poet does all three things, simultaneously.

I open the door into hall and over threshold after threshold slowly oh so slowly I bring

97 “An airman,” Until Before After, 51; W. B. Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” The Poems, 184-5.

98 “It is,” Until Before After, 58.

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