Carson, Ciaran - John Lucas (review date 3 August 1990)

John Lucas (review date 3 August 1990)

SOURCE: Lucas, John. “Changing History.” New Statesman and Society 3, no. 112 (3 August 1990): 42.

[In the following excerpt, Lucas praises Carson's Belfast Confetti.]

There's so much going on in Ciaran Carson's new volume [Belfast Confetti] that it's impossible to do more here than offer a few pointers to its riches. First, then, the title. The phrase crops up, menacingly and/or enigmatically, in several poems and is glossed in one of the many-layered prose pieces that regularly punctuate the second, middle section of the volume. “Brick” offers a meditation on the material out of which Belfast is built—just as others debate the origins of the city's name, its geography, its history. “The subversive half-brick, conveniently hand-sized, is an essential ingredient of the ammunition known as ‘Belfast confetti’, and has been tried and trusted by generations of rioters.”

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[The entire page is 684 words long]

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