Carson, Ciaran - Neil Corcoran (essay date 2 November 1990)

Neil Corcoran (essay date 2 November 1990)

SOURCE: Corcoran, Neil. “Past Imperfect.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4510 (2 November 1990): 1184.

[In the following review, Corcoran discusses Carson's style in Belfast Confetti.]

Ciaran Carson's last book, The Irish for No, published in 1987, was one of the most warmly received volumes of poetry in the 1980s. For several reviewers recognition was accompanied by relief, since Carson had maintained a poetic silence of over ten years since his first volume, The New Estate. Now, only two years later—Belfast Confetti was first published by the Gallery Press in Ireland last year—comes the follow-up: Carson's is manifestly not the one-volume-every-three-years career progression (and over-production) characteristic of the contemporary poet. And all the better for that: the first thing to be said about the new book is how delightedly we may recognize in it the signs of a...

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