Customer Reviews

The Irish for No

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This is one of those epoch-making books that colors how you see everything that comes after it. At the height of the painfully certain 1980's, with Thatcherism and Reaganomics out there telling everyone just how it is, Ciaran Carson came along with his marathon Whitman-inspired lines and his almost naively inquisitive tone, and presaged the decade of uncertainty that was the 1990's.

But I don't think this book sets out to redefine anything. Instead, it strips away layers of definition, its long irregular lines reflecting the shapelessness of the ideas Carson seeks. Violent Belfast, which through most of the Twentieth Century was the opposite of a literary city, here becomes a beacon every bit equal to Leopold Bloom's Dublin. But how can a person find himself in a city where maps lie, where memory is unreliable, and where indirection is the rule rather than the norm?

Of course, he can't. And that is the message Carson brings to the fore with this slim volume. Carson evades the grim despair that pervades much current poetry, but his formless indecision is an accurate reflection of the search for purpose and shape we see so often today. Really, Carson seems almost optimistic, even downright happy, in the lack of specificity that his city imposes on his life. Why, there are so many ways to grow!

Recommended for lovers of poetry, students of history, and devotees of human nature. Carson's "The Irish for No" is one of those rare books that has already influenced you in ways you don't know. And once you read it, the influence only becomes that much more powerful.

There is no Irish for "No". The title of this volume immediately launches us into a realm of confusing and unreliable language. Carson uses language like a toy, the kind of toy you want to take apart to see how it works. He is forever stretching and making holes in language, highlighting its inadequacy to communicate. This is a familiar trope of "postmodernity". But for Carson this playfulness is bound to his subject, that is the city of Belfast. Just as language is a system which does not quite make sense, where symbols only have an arbitrary relationship with what they symbolise, so is the city. In undermining the authority of language, Carson simultaneously undermines the symbols which have had such an elevated position in the sectarian divisions of the city. The colour green and the colour orange, a person's name or a particular flag are shown to have only superficial importance. This is a clever volume (sometimes irritatingly so) on a very important subject. Carson refuses to sink to an emotive level, an achievement which should be given due credit in an environment where passions are running extremely high.