The last lines of the last poem in Ciaran Carson’s final poetry collection Still Life (WFU, 2017) read:
And I loved the buzz of the one-bar electric heater as a bus
or truck passed by,
And I loved the big windows and whatever I could see
through them, be it cloudy or clear,
And the way they trembled and thrilled to the sound of
the world beyond.
It’s hard to accept that these are indeed Ciaran Carson’s final lines. While gesturing towards his imminent mortality, the “world beyond” is very much our world—the multitudinous quotidian world beyond the window that Carson has constantly explored through language, forever finding other slants, other connections and associations. Throughout his poetry collections and in each prose work, Carson has consistently reinvented his forms and techniques, moving from the crafted and subdued verse of his first collection, through the long-lined landmark collections of the late 80s—The Irish For No and Belfast Confetti—to the austerity of On the Night Watch (2009) and Until Before After (2010). Carson’s poetic has always been a malleable one, in the sense that his work seems open to adapting itself to the language and forms required for its own explorations. Still Life proves no exception. Each poem contemplates a painting, an object which anchors the poems to their present moment, including the reality of Carson’s terminal diagnosis of lung cancer, which he faced during the writing of these poems.
The paintings are rarely contemplated in a gallery setting. Rather, they are often reproduced and nearly always seen in a domestic space. They appear hung on a bedroom wall, in an online tour of the London National Gallery, an image on a laptop screen, a remembered original or a color plate in a book, as in “Claude Monet, Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1880,” which initially remained unopened as the writer had just located it in his study when “some vandal upended the terracotta pot of / daffodils / In our little front garden.” The paintings themselves provide an impetus behind the work in this collection but the physical act of viewing allows Carson to alternate seamlessly between his immediate daily life while negotiating the business of memory. By contemplating images in familiar surroundings, and by leaving the poems open to the incidentals surrounding these moments of engagement, the poems of Still Life manage to relay the textures of his life palpably. There is a bountifulness to Carson’s depiction of everyday minutiae, an attention and appreciation of the quotidian that is enhanced by the stark reality of his mortality. “Claude Monet, Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1880” ends:
It’s beautiful weather, the 30th March, and tomorrow
the clocks go forward.
How strange it is to be lying here listening to whatever it is
is going on.
The days are getting longer now, however many of them I
have left.
And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily
outlast their end.
Stylistically, what might first strike the reader on opening this collection is the return of lines that would have once been regarded as quintessential Carson. The use of long, seventeen or so syllable lines, reminiscent of those of his late 80s collections, seems surprising, however they provide a dexterous form for Carson to contemplate a wide expanse of material. In the earlier collections, Carson’s lines were said to be influenced by the rhythms of speech, traditional music, or the writings of C. K. Williams. Carson comments on them in Still Life, proffering another take:
It put me in mind of the carriage return bell of my old Imperial
typewriter, how
Back in the 80s I measured my verse by the width of an A4
page. For whatever reason
I’ve gone back to that arbitrary rule that turns your thinking
unexpectedly. Though
Necessarily it turns out differently when printed in a book.
Carson continues in this vein, describing the typographical appearance of the resultant stanzas. Reading these lines, we are looking at the enactment of what is being described, as Carson comments: “in other / words, like these / Which you are viewing now, which I have written only now.” His work frequently includes observations on the present moment of the act of writing in a style that is consistently unforced and appropriate. However, in this collection his deft employment of the present tense, digressing, then pulling us back, provides an astounding sense of immediacy. In “Jeffrey Morgan, Hare Bowl, 2008” we read, over the poet’s shoulder as it were, an e-mail from the painter explaining how he forms his “craquelure effect.” Then, “A car horn sounds. / I look out the window. It’s the usual crowded parking, morning surgery hours— / The Antrim Road Medical Centre is only five doors up Glandore / Avenue from us.” The next stanza continues: “I’m often there. Was there earlier this morning, getting an / advance blood / For tomorrow’s treatment at the City. In fact we’re waiting to be / seen there now.” He moves the reader through a series of closely related “presents”: from the contemplation of the painting, to the real time of the email, then remembering what appears to be the morning’s medical procedure, before arriving at the “now” of waiting for chemotherapy treatment.
The moment of reading and the moment of writing are so adeptly intertwined by Carson, with his use of tense and perfectly timed digressions, that the poems appear, at times, to be forming as they are read. The convincing and beguiling immediacy of these poems also seems related to Carson’s heightened intimacy of tone, with attention focused on his home and near surroundings: the combined effect has these poems appear utterly of the moment. Much of the intimacy and immediacy of the poems is due to their reflections and questions being directly addressed to his wife Deirdre. The poems arise from a present inhabited by the two of them, and the reflections throughout the volume are largely shared ones. The ekphrastic poem has a long history as a type or genre, but it is probably unique to Still Life that the paintings informing the poems are contemplated by a couple, (“Only now has it / Occurred to us to talk about or of it at this length …”). In “Yves Klein, IKB 79, 1959” even the memory of when the titular painting was viewed is a matter between the two of them (“I’ve been asking you off and on for some months now when / we might first / Have seen it where it hangs in the Tate Modern in London”). In “Basil Blackshaw, Windows I-V, 2001” the passage of 17 years makes the circumstances of the first viewing in the Ulster Museum hard to pin down, but the attempt at fixing it is still a joint enterprise: “And were / you there with me then? / I can’t remember, nor can you when I ask. But we like to think / of that first viewing / As by both of us…”
For a poet whose name has become almost synonymous with his home city, it is notable that Carson’s poetry, until the current collection, has mainly concerned itself with the city center and with South and West Belfast, rather than the North of the city where he has resided for some thirty odd years (there are exceptions of course—and his prose is a whole other matter). In Still Life however, the poems are set predominately in Carson’s part of North Belfast. This covers the distance walked up Glandore Avenue, to a few streets (predominately Hopefield Avenue) and the Waterworks (formerly reservoir, latterly park) on the other side of the main Antrim Road and back. This route, regularly traversed by Ciaran and Deirdre throughout the collection, acts as a secondary organizing principle, often literally grounding the poems after aesthetic and material contemplations of the painting in question. By the end of the second poem, which ends on a haiku-like note (“How clean and fresh and green are the newly sprung leaves / of the chestnut tree!”) we’re becoming familiar with their “daily walk / Around the Waterworks.” “Canaletto, The Stonemason’s Yard, c.1725” opens with the pair of them watching a mechanical digger behind chain-link fencing at Hopefield Avenue, five pages later and they’re back looking “At the big yellow JCB. And as for what they’re going to build / there, we can’t wait to see.” The affectionate, occasionally self-mocking tone is a delight; and as a reader you can orientate yourself by these walks, their landmarks that become progressively more familiar as you make your way through the collection. Always, as they make the short distance back home, something’s in bloom, there’s some newly sprung leaves or some blackbird making itself known in Glandore Avenue, that unlikely bright harbor.
This immediacy is achieved in a collection that paradoxically accommodates any amount of looking back: here we have Carson, walking Belfast again, writing in long-lines again, remembering sessions in the late 70s “When we’d drink and smoke and play all night like there was / no tomorrow.” He remembers too the Ulster Fry the next afternoon and the many ways of frying an egg, which recalls the prose of Last Night’s Fun from the mid-90s. Remembering a civil service job in early 70s Belfast, he recalls the bomb scares, leaving the office for the pub to “drink, / And leave the world unseen,” which borrows from Keats but specifically recalls The Irish For No. “Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm, 1650-51” opens with a poignant genealogy of the writing instruments Carson has used in recent years, recalling The Pen Friend (2009), of course, but also 1997’s The Star Factory and the Japanese Zebra “Zeb-rolle” 0.5 pen with which the first draft was written. Carson’s asides relating to his illness are matter-of-fact (“Before the diagnosis I’d written nothing publishable for four / years, but when I took / The pencil up it seemed to set me free…”) but they are all the more heartbreaking for it. “Gerard Dillon, Self Contained Flat, exhibited 1955” references a favorite painting of his father’s and the poem ends on the words “here I am this that and the other,” an affectionate nod to his father’s memoir, Seo, Siúd, agus Siúd Eile.
“Yves Klein, IKB 79, 1959” moves from the blue of the paintings to the “cloudless blue” sky of Hiroshima (a place Klein had visited) on the day the atom bomb was dropped. By this stage the “muffled boom,” which Carson remembered from a decommissioned quarry at the start of the poem, has taken on an altogether more ominous tone. This becomes starkly effective further into the poem as Carson remembers Bloody Friday in Belfast, July 1972, hearing a sequence of explosions across the city on a “cloudless summer day” and watching “cloud / after cloud blossoming into the blue.” The poem keeps the final sentences to one line each; the effect of the comparative abruptness, in the context of this collection, is unmistakable. The shortened line length, the change in register and language are devastating as Carson writes: “The people who had set the bombs apologised in empty / language. / Firemen shovelled into body bags the unspeakable remains / of the day.”
In “Basil Blackshaw, Windows I-V, 2001,” Carson looks at Jim Allen’s painting The House with Palm Trees, which depicts the building where Carson rented a flat in the mid-70s. He reminisces while sitting “in the sunlight from one of the big / first floor sash windows” in the Linen Hall Library café, of a bombing near the flat when he lived there, causing his bedroom ceiling to collapse weeks later “as if it only then remembered the event.” He was in the kitchen: “All I know is that I wasn’t / There then, could have been, and here I am now, talking to Paul / in the sunlight in the Linen Hall.” The poem closes with Deirdre repeating a favorite story of watching, from these library windows, the slapstick of a near mishap involving a man reading a paper, an old lady with a shopping trolley, a lamppost. “Time,” Ciaran Carson wrote back in the late 80s, in his poem “Hamlet,” “Is conversation; it is the hedge that flits incessantly into / the present….”
Windows, framing life that is never still, recur throughout this volume. This strikes me as emblematic of Carson’s accomplishment here, in poems that face terminal illness but that see reality through a frame that is really a window, following all the dazzling strangeness and abundance of memory, of conversation, of the everyday. This is a vital collection, brimming with life. There are many aspects of this volume that may have surprised on a first reading: the frequent intimacy of tone and locale, personal memories of the Troubles when the conflict was raging, and particularly the stylistic return to long lines in his poetry. But when did we last read a collection of Ciaran Carson’s that didn’t re-invent or re-imagine its own forms? Still Life, incredibly, contains some of his finest work.