[In the following excerpt, Wiman analyzes Carson's style in Opera et Cetera.]

Though Ciaran Carson's poems are […] weakened by a style which seems less a necessity than a handy means of making more poems, there is a serious intelligence and inventiveness at work in his latest book [Opera et Cetera]. Written entirely in long-lined, free-verse rhyming couplets, adhering to predetermined patterns (twenty-six poems titled with letters of the alphabet, a series of poems arising out of Latin literary references, another alphabetically determined sequence), and completely without tonal variation, Carson's poems are hardly distinguishable from each other. To some extent, this is a strength. There is an exuberance of spirit in the poems, a playful extravagance and irreverence in both the perceptions and the language which can carry over from poem to poem. The effect depends upon a sort of willing disorientation on the part of the reader, because there is rarely a coherence of thought or narrative thread to otherwise hold things together. As with an Ashbery poem, tone is everything. Assent to it, and there is not only the pleasant levity to enjoy, but also rarer, greater moments when an individual poem will take on some of the strange logic and irreducible truth of fable or dream.

But as is usually the case when poems are so alike, there is very little genuine emotion here, very little of that passion for experience which pressures a poet's voice into new registers of feeling and unforeseen forms. It is not a good sign that Carson manages to turn even his adaptations from the Romanian poet Stefan Augustin Doinas into facsimiles of his own poems. After a while the tonal and formal monotony becomes deadening, and the whole project begins to seem gimmicky and methodical. It becomes difficult to pay attention to individual poems because the payoff is simply so low, and you find yourself anticipating the next self-consciously wacky association, or skipping to the ends of lines to see how inventive or silly the next rhyme will be: boomeranged/meringue, AWOL/narwhal, craquelure/raconteur, dragon-whiff/hieroglyph. Only occasionally does Carson stop you short with a phrase or image which suggests that he is perhaps a much better poet than his surface dexterity and knee-jerk irony are letting him be in this book. “Eesti,” “O,” and “The News” are accomplished poems. “Kilo” contains this line: “The foreign freighter creaked its starry moorings. Frogmen swam up through a galaxy.”