A life in poetry: Ciaran Carson

"Belfast Confetti", one of Ciaran Carson's best known poems, repays rereading: the more levels one uncovers, the more one discovers what makes him tick. "Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys." (It helps, but is not entirely necessary, to know that Belfast confetti was metal detritus from the shipyards.) Then the narrator feels panic at being trapped in the streets he was walking through, "Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street - why can't I escape?"; the Saracen, the stop-and-search questions - "What is / My name? Where am I coming from?"

From those streets, of course, all of them off the Catholic Falls Road: Raglan, he doesn't say, is the street he grew up on. The question, then, is a particular affront, but also a reminder of how small and enclosed the area always was, and how it will always, at some level, define who he is. The metaphor that holds the poem together is of communication interrupted, a sentence dissolving into "a fount of broken type"; "Why can't I escape? Every move is punctuated." "Belfast Confetti" is confined as tightly into its two stanzas as its narrator is into his warren of side-streets - and yet, as a poem, it is for Carson a kind of escape.

Carson on Carson

Ce n'est pas comme le pain de Paris
There's no stretch in it,
you said. It was our anniversary,
whether first or last.

It's the matter of the texture.
Elasticity.
The crust should crackle when you
break the baton. Then you pull

the crumb apart to make skeins full of
holes. I was grappling
with your language over the wreck of
the dining table.

The maitre d' was looking at us in a
funny way
as if he caught the drift I sought
between the lines you spoke.
For one word never came across as
just itself, but you
would put it over as insinuating
something else.

These are the first 10 lines of "Second Time Round" in my last book. When I first wrote them I was not entirely convinced by the voice, which didn't seem to be the kind of thing I was used to writing. But the voice persisted and I began to grapple pleasurably with this new language, always surprised by what emerged. I was no doubt helped by the formal constraint of the 14-syllable line, and the various kinds of rhythm it could accommodate. I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.