MINISTERIO DE SALUD

watch-face, and in the fact that the subject “failed / to see” (20-1) towards the end of the poem. A lack of punctuation makes it unclear what the subject did not see, but these lines are linked by rhyme to the unanswerable question with which the poem ends. The penultimate stanza, “O what is time / my friend” (22-3), takes on a studiedly artificial tone, both archaic and ironic, simultaneously elevating the poem's diction, yet at the same time placing it in danger of sounding like sarcasm or pastiche. Both these lines, with the reference to “time”, and the final lines, “when faced with / eternity” (24-5), raise grand philosophical concepts, yet also make use of simple puns in a poem which has been describing a pocket-watch. The word “eternity” might seem to be the most conventionally elegiac consolation with which to end a poem, linked as it is to the idea of an after-death existence, and reinforced in this religious reading by the earlier mention of “salvation”. However, if it is something to be “faced”, as the previous line suggests, “eternity” might also be a threat of oblivion and isolation, similar to the bleak loneliness heard at the end of “Adonais”. Carson simultaneously utilises and subverts the conventions of elegy in this poem.

The threat of oblivion is made more explicit in “Exile”:77 night after night I walk the smouldering dark streets Sevastopol Crimea Inkerman Odessa Balkan Lucknow Belfast is many places then as now all lie in ruins and it is as much as I can do

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even one

from oblivion (1-24)

This returns to Carson's favourite theme of Belfast. There is a sense of aftermath: the streets are still “smouldering”, and “all lie / in ruins”.78 The list of street names recalls those heard in earlier works, but in this format, they are given a heightened significance, each standing alone on the page, leaving the reader to re-connect the words to their meanings.79 The list of names acts as a further interrogation of the practice of mapping a city: presented in this way, the physical layout of the city loses its importance as the spatial pattern of the streets becomes merely a temporal phenomenon: these streets are as subject to decay and destruction as any living organism.80 The connotation of the Crimean war adds a further dimension of critique upon the Victorians who mapped out and planned these streets' construction: the naming of these Belfast streets is seen to be a project of imperial superimposition.81 The lament for their loss might also be an acknowledgement of a lost empire, or conversely, might be a work of mourning for other victims of imperial ambition, such as the inhabitants of the Crimean peninsula. Where the streets have been named after British “victories”, those who feel themselves to be suffering as a result of British imperialism might read them in an entirely different light; perhaps as reminders of British oppression. Indeed, Heaney has described the situation in Northern Ireland as “the tail-end of a struggle in a province between territorial piety and imperial power”.82 In this way, Carson's poem links to the work of Longley and Mahon, in mourning for casualties of wars across European history, and in drawing comparisons between the experience of the Troubles for Northern Irish people and the experience of war across

78 See Knowles, 29.

79 The list of street names might also be linked to Anne Devlin’s short story “Naming the Names”, in which the narrator, when questioned about her involvement in a killing carried out by a paramilitary group, will not, or cannot, name the people who carried out the attack; instead she can only list the street names of Belfast, “Naming the Names,” The Way-Paver (London: Faber, 1981 rpt. 1986) 93-119.

80 The list in this poem might also link it to the work of Longley. Brearton has commented upon the elegiac effect of listing in Carson's poem: “It is perhaps no coincidence that poems such as 'Exile' or 'War' begin to look like lists themselves, brief inventories of words that rescue fleeting moments from oblivion. Breaking News accumulates these moments; in doing so the collection itself gathers strength much as the process of listing serves as a stay against forgetfulness,” “News of the World,” 144.

81 This argument would certainly be adopted by various socialist and Marxist movements within Northern Ireland, who would argue that the current peace process is a continuation of British imperialism. For example: “The reality for the British was that their ‘peace process’ was in fact a major imperialist offensive designed to forge a new capitalist stability and roll back all the gains of the anti-imperialist struggle,” John McAnulty, “Northern Ireland: not peace, but an imperialist offensive,” Workers’ Liberty 21 December, 2009, accessed 07/02/2012 <http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2009/12/21/northern- ireland-not-peace-imperialist-offensive>. Similarly, the first point on a “Basis for a Statement on the Situation in Northern Ireland” which was passed at the Dublin Conference of the SLA, October, 1971 by DR O’Connor Lysaght, states that “The Northern Irish situation is a natural product of British

Imperialism's hold on Ireland.” Robert Dorn (DR O'Connor Lysaght), “Irish Nationalism and British Imperialism,” 1973, Arguments for a Workers’ Republic, accessed 07/02/2012

<http://www.workersrepublic.org/Pages/Ireland/Trotskyism/robertdorn5.html>. 82 Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” 24.

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The theme of salvation, which was heard in “Last Effect” might be seen to return in “Exile”, yet this time there is no religious connotation; perhaps, in this poem, it would be more appropriate to link the word “save” from the penultimate stanza with the idea of “salvaging”. Indeed, it is the poet himself who struggles to “save / even one // from oblivion”. Here, there is no question of an afterlife, as in “Last Effect”, perhaps because the poem is more obviously referring to the losses of individual streets, rather than of human subjects. Yet, in mourning for the city, it must be assumed that Carson counts human loss as part of the suffering that has been experienced by Belfast. While the focus on “oblivion” at the end of the poem sounds

particularly final, there is, nevertheless, some hint at an elegiac consolation in this poem, in the sense that, while the poet's efforts are down-played – “it is // as much / as I can do” – it does seem possible that by writing elegies, he is able to perform small works of salvation, or salvage, for the city. In his poetic works of memorial, which enact a literary re-membering of Belfast, Carson is perhaps able to find consolation in the promise of poetry.

In the collections which follow Breaking News, Carson writes from the perspective of relative peace, following the political negotiations during the 1990s. His recent poetry continues to bear the marks of the Troubles, although he finds ways of writing which are increasingly oblique, and which continue to experiment with form. His 2008 collection For All We Know might be read as a sonnet sequence, although it is uniquely arranged into two sets of identically named poems, and tracks the progression of a fictional relationship. The book has been compared to the earlier collection, The Twelfth of Never:

Nearly 10 years ago, Ciaran Carson published a remarkable book-length sonnet sequence, The Twelfth of Never. […] It offered another remarkable take on Carson's mapping of the Northern Irish experience, a mapping that has evolved and transformed with each new book. In his latest collection, For All We Know, he successfully returns to the sonnet sequence. But now the effect is very different: more austere, more ambitiously structured, obsessed with an almost claustrophobic circling of character and event. The tone of the new work is melancholic, hushed, elegiac.83

One poem from the collection which seems to comment on the Troubles from a post-peace talk perspective is entitled “Peace”:84

Back then you wouldn't know from one day to the next what might

happen next. Everything was, as it were, provisional, slipping from the unforeseeable into tomorrow even as the jittery present became history.

What kinds of times are these, you'd say, when a conversation is deemed a crime because it includes so much that is said? And all the unanswered questions of those dark days come

83 Charles Bainbridge, “In a pane of moonlight,” The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2008, accessed 19/01/2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/21/saturdayreviewsfeatures.guardianreview31>.

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to haunt us, the disabled guns that still managed to kill, the witnesses that became ghosts in the blink of an eye. Whom can we prosecute when no one is left fit to speak? I read in this morning's paper, you said, of a stables

in England which had been set on fire. An eyewitness spoke of horses whinnying, of hooves battering on the doors, doors padlocked and bolted against all possible escape. (1-14)

While the poems in this volume, like the ones in The Twelfth of Never, are variations on the sonnet, they make more radical departures from the traditional form than in the earlier collection: while they are generally fourteen lines long, they are written in fourteen-syllable lines, and tend not to use regular rhyme. The longer lines give the poems something of the appearance of the earlier collections. The memories described can be linked with the events of the previous decades in Northern Ireland, which is implied by the use of loaded terms like “provisional”, and “disabled guns”, both of which were heard frequently in the media reportage of the on-going peace deals and calls for weapons decommissioning during the 1990s.

However, the poem is taken from a sequence which traces the relationship of a fictional couple, Gabriel and Nina, and while he is Irish, and Catholic, she is half-French, half-English, and has a complex set of memories of her own. Therefore, the “jittery present”, in which “a conversation is deemed a crime” might refer to multiple contexts of civil unrest and political instability. Furthermore, by using fictional characters, Carson distances himself from any assumptions that the poems are directly related to his personal memories and experiences of Belfast and the Troubles. While it might be expected that poetry written during the relative peace of a new century in Northern Ireland might be able to explore the memories of the Troubles with a greater openness, the poems of For All We Know deal with loss in a guarded and oblique way. Despite the fact that this poem is entitled “Peace”, there is little consolation in it. A sense of injustice pervades the piece, as witnesses of “those dark days” have “become ghosts in the blink of an eye”, and the reader is left with the unsettling question, “Whom can we prosecute when no one is left fit to speak?” This question is one which might be applied to a number of twentieth- and twenty-first century contexts, and brings to mind other victims of injustice, like the “lost souls of Treblinka and Pompeii” who are mourned in Mahon's poem “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”.85 Indeed, where Mahon uses mushrooms as a kind of objective correlative for all voiceless, powerless people, Carson seems to use the image of horses locked in a burning stable in a similar way, to figure the helplessness of those trapped in a volatile political situation.

Carson's 2009 volume On the Night Watch takes his engagement with both poetic form and with the themes of memory and loss to a further level of obliquity. As Matthews notes, the

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