For All We Know, Ciaran Carson
by Wes Davis

from The Yale Review, January 2009

In Last Night's Fun, a book about Irish music that he wrote in the 1990s, Ciaran Carson tells the story of listening to the celebrated Sligo flute player Seamus Tansey noodling his way through a string of traditional songs—"The Lady on the Island," "The Little Pack of Tailors," "The Sailor on the Rock"—playing each tune over and over, developing different themes and following first one, then another. Each time around a given song would change a little until finally, by some nearly undetectable evolution, it became something else, "The Lady on the Island" disappearing into itself to re-emerge as, say, "The Sailor on the Rock."

As he describes the session Carson seems entirely enthralled by the moment and the movement of the music. Tansey, he writes, is "rolling it one way this time and another the next ... blowing the high notes low and vice versa, jumping octaves all the time." I wonder whether Carson may have recognized in Tansey's playing something close to his own stock-in-trade as a poet, his gift for finding the roundabout route from one story into another (from how Horse Boyle got his name, for example, to the firebombing of Dresden) or his penchant for letting words leap across registers of meaning (as in a recent poem that describes "the second-hand sweep" of a "second-hand watch"). "The set," he says, "takes on a beautiful poetic justice." Then something strange happens:

I burst into applause, and realise I'm listening to a tape I made the year I bought the Sony portable: now I hear the ghostly presence of my own applause back there, back then, I come back with a jolt to now. My eyes come to. I'm sitting in the kitchen, feeling dislocated. I'd been on a trip. It was back in 1978 and we were in the Hotel Carlton, Belleek, County Fermanagh, just across the road from the famous Pottery. I no longer have the Sony—I gave it to the flute-player Desi Wilkinson—but I can visualise it sitting on the floor beneath a table in the Carlton. It's nearly the size of a bag of sugar and about twice as heavy, with its matt black steel casing and its grainy black leather holder, its chunky buttons. I recall their click, their springy pressure on my fingertips.

The tape runs on. Now there's gabble round the table. Because the music is so good and the Sony was the last thing on my mind, I'd left it running absentmindedly. I identify the voices: Gary Hastings, Gerry O'Donnell, Maura McConnnell, Deirdre Shannon, me. Others. Random conversation, laughter, fore-and-background clinking noises.

Like Beckett's Krapp, but in a much better mood, Carson is left swinging between two selves, one unspooling from the tape recorded back in 1978 and another in the kitchen now. The Sony portable stands in for memory; it is both the thing remembered, in all the grainy detail of its size and heft, and the way memory works. It keeps running when it is the last thing on your mind, and what it preserves is not always what you would expect. Over the years what is captured in all that foreground and background clinking is the sound of somebody morphing from the self back then to the self here now. It is the soundtrack to what you see when your life flashes before your eyes, like a time-lapse sequence of the lady on the island turning into the sailor on the rock. And the random conversation, laughter, and noise that turns out to be more significant than it seemed is more and more the material of Carson's poetry.

Reading his genre-bending new book, in particular, is like having your life flash before your eyes, twice. A narrative sequence of seventy linked poems in which the second half repeats the titles and themes of the first, For All We Know meanders two times through the circuitous story of a love affair between an Irishman and a Frenchwoman, whose shared experiences, along with the dimmer childhood memories they disclose in conversation, form a kind of montage history of Europe in the wake of World War II. The book is part poetry collection, part noir novel, part fugue. And the sum of the parts is an utterly engaging portrayal of what it feels like to fall in love, fall apart, grieve over the loss, and fumble for explanations. In George Santayana's now stock formulation it is the failure to remember the past that condemns us to repeat it. But in For All We Know it looks more as though we are all condemned regardless—not because we can't remember what has gone before but because continually rehearsing the past is the only way we have to hold on to it.

The basic elements of the poetry on display in For All We Know have been part of Carson's toolkit since early in his career. When he staked out his poetic territory in the landmark 1987 volume The Irish for No, he seemed to be launching a barrage of language against the political entrenchment his native city of Belfast had settled into since the Troubles began in earnest in 1968. In long, rapid-fire lines, the poems in that volume made a breathless catalogue of local sights and sounds, as if Carson were determined to do for Belfast what Joyce had wanted Ulysses to do for Dublin, recording, against some future—or now perhaps imminent—destruction, everything that made the city what it was. In those dire circumstances anything that evoked the city was occasion for poetry. A whiff of perfume, in "Calvin Klein's Obsession," was enough to set off a Proustian swing through his memories of the place:

                                     Every time that Blue Grass
Hits me, it is 1968. I'm walking with her through the smoggy early      dusk
Of West Belfast: coal-smoke, hops, fur, the smell of stout and      whiskey
Breathing out from somewhere.

But if Carson's Belfast memories were readily available in the 1980s, they were also under assault, and his poetry fingered the bits and pieces of Northern Irish life as if weighing the hope of recovery against the threat of destruction. The poetic mode that emerged in The Irish for No depended on celebrating what could be pieced together from the fragments. It was no accident that confetti, the throwaway stuff that falls between fragmentation and celebration, became Carson's trademark image. He used it in "August 1969," where documents of the past are strewn across a riot-torn city—"Confetti drifts across the city: / Charred receipts and bills-of-lading, contracts, dockets, pay-slips"—and then in his best-known poem, "Belfast Confetti," which plays on a slang term for the kind of scrap metal sectarian terrorists used as shrapnel in improvised bombs. "Suddenly as the riot squad moved in," the poem says, "it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys."

In For All We Know, Carson is still writing long, artfully chock-a-block lines, but where his earlier poems raced to get everything in, these feel as if they are watching their step in order to sort things out. The book's disposition is retrospective from the start. The opening poem, titled "Second Time Around," flashes back to the kind of conversation, swirling around a throwaway comment about Parisian bread, that Carson might have captured on his Sony portable:

Ce n'est pas comme le pain de Paris. There's no stretch in it, you said. It was our anniversary, whether first or last.

It's the matter of the texture. Elasticity.
The crust should crackle when you break the baton. Then you pull

the crumb apart to make skeins full of holes. I was grappling
with your language over the wreck of the dining table.

The maitre d' was looking at us in a funny way
as if he caught the drift I sought between the lines you spoke.

Gabriel, whose name we won't learn for another seventy-odd pages, is combing through these memories of a love affair that ended tragically, "in search," he says later, "of the twist in the plot, the point of no return." But his tone from the beginning makes it clear that he knows whatever he pieces together will be a version of the story, not the story. "When the book starts again in part 2 with another poem called "Second Time Around" that reworks the motifs of the first version, we are suddenly in the same boat as he, turning over the odd familiar word or phrase and "trying to remember," as Gabriel says, "where I'd heard it last."

If truth is beyond reach, though, Gabriel finds that there is nonetheless a certain value in arranging and rearranging the snatches of memory at his disposal, "as the quilters make a pattern of their remnants and rags / and the jersey, unravelled becomes a new skein of wool." Much of what he discovers has to do with the nature of language and the self, starting with the way the private language of lovers in the first "Second Time Around" mimics lyric poetry: "For one word never came across as just itself, but you/ would put it over as insinuating something else." And like lyric poetry in John Stuart Mill's definition, the conversation between Gabriel and Nina—we learn her name later too—exists as if overheard. As the pair meet and part in Paris, Dresden, Belfast, Berlin, the remnants of their conversation accumulate, and when the affair is over Gabriel is left scanning what amounts to an anthology of their lives together, still reading between the lines for the drift the maitre d' may have caught.

For all the appearance of randomness in the book's piecing together of these half-remembered incidents and snatches of conversation, For All We Know is in fact a virtuosic exercise in authorial control. Carson's lines, although they read remarkably like the kind of natural if heightened speech you would expect from strangers falling in love, are uniformly fourteen syllables long and paired in unrhymed couplets—seven, fourteen, or twenty-one pairs of lines to a poem. It is the line of Chapman's Iliad, but as David Stanley recently pointed out, it is also the trademark line of cowboy poetry.

In his own use of the form Carson rides the boundary between the epic and the colloquial. For instance, the Apple that Gabriel remembers Nina acquiring in "Proposal" is both the computer that first appeared in 1984 and an echo of Milton's apple: "you'd speak temptingly of the serendipity / / of the Apple, how it seemed to put words in your mouth / to say what you wanted to say but could not until then." Carson's descriptions of the affair shift effortlessly from the domestic scale—"Then, slowly, slowly we would draw in on one another / until everything was implicated like wool spooled / / from my yawning hands as you wound the yarn into a ball"—to the global: "we two seas foundering into one another over / the neck of a peninsula, making it an island." Sometimes they are both at once; the first "L'Air du Temps" shuttles between the intimate scent of the perfume that gives the poem its name and the Paris the scent evokes. "I'm looking at the patchwork quilt of Paris," Nina says, "parks, avenues, cemeteries, temples, impasses, arcades. / I can see the house where I was raised, and my mother's house. / I am in her boudoir looking at her in the mirror / / as she, pouting, not looking, puts on L'Air du Temps, a spurt / of perfume on each wrist before she puts her wristwatch on." Even the Troubles, as represented in For All We Know, are both the local affair—"We were in the Ulster Milk Bar I think they blew up back / in the Seventies"—and an ongoing condition in the broader cosmopolitan world the lovers occupy, a red-haired cousin of the revolutions of 1968, say, or a desperate descendent of the French Resistance.

Whatever the scale, certain articles keep cropping up in these poems—a wristwatch, a spurt of perfume, a helicopter hovering overhead, Mont Blanc pens, and knockoff copies—like artifacts of a lost culture or the incontestable pieces of hard evidence an alibi would have to account for. The latter explanation might be closer to the mark, since there are details that suggest this affair was clandestine in more than the conventional sense. Nina, for example, makes a covert visit to a professor in Dresden to pick up an unexplained cache of microfilm, an aunt is accused of betraying the Resistance, a waiter turns out to be a former Stasi agent, bent on passing along the secrets of Cold War interrogation. Against this mysterious backdrop it is a comfort when a watch or pen reappears as a kind of blaze on a trail you might otherwise lose.

Those recurring motifs are also the keynotes of the book's music. Carson reveals what he is up to in an epigraph taken from Glenn Gould's "So You Want to Write a Fugue": "Fugue must perform its frequently stealthy work with continuously shifting melodic fragments that remain, in the 'tune' sense, perpetually unfinished." Gould's description of the fugue is not far from Carson's thinking about art in general. In "The Exiles Club," a poem that appeared in The Irish for No, Carson imagined the work of art as a perpetually unfinished project, a work of reconstruction of the past that never quite catches up to the constantly changing present:

Every Thursday in the upstairs lounge of the Wollongong Bar, they      make
Themselves at home with Red Heart Stout, Park Drive cigarettes and      Dunville's whiskey,
A slightly-mouldy batch of soda farls. Eventually, they get down to      business.
After years they have reconstructed the whole of the Falls Road, and      now
Are working on the backstreets: Lemon, Peel and Omar, Balaclava,      Alma.

They just about keep up with the news of bombings and demolition,      and are
Struggling with the finer details: the names and dates carved out
On the back bench of the Leavers' Class in Slate Street School; the      Nemo Cafe menu;
The effects of the 1941 Blitz, the entire contents of Paddy Lavery's      pawnshop.

For the exiles in Wollongong, it is the landscape of memory that provides the continuously shifting fragments of our personal fugues. In For All We Know the situation is similar, if at once more intimate and more universal, and the book's melody is likewise a music of dissolution. Reading it is a matter of "listening," as one poem puts it, "to shells becoming shingle, and shingle sand."

Although the tone of the book is undeniably elegiac, it is clear that Carson finds a certain freedom in the way things fall apart. In the first of the two poems titled "Redoubt," Gabriel reminds himself that "in another country you are free / to renegotiate yourself or what you thought you were." There is a sense in For All We Know that every moment is another country, and we continually renegotiate the past and what we thought it was. In fact, Carson suggests in "The Shadow," it may be that what falsifies the past is the story that doesn't change: "You know when someone's telling lies? you said. They / get their story right every time, down to the last word." But the idea is sullied when it is affirmed later in the poem by a German waiter who had "been in the Stasi once. / / The lie is memorized, the truth is remembered, he said." And, as the second version of "The Shadow" allows, "There were always those who thought the opposite to be true."

Or it may be that truth is somewhere in the tension between different versions of the past. Alongside the quotation from Glenn Gould, Carson also uses an old French song as an epigraph. As it appears at the front of the book the first verse reads, in Carson's translation, "Night approaches and my village / Slumbers over there in silence / The bell rings, and its language / Announces the end of farewells." But it turns out he had misremembered one of the lines. In the acknowledgments at the back of the book Carson tells the story: "I learned the French song from my sister Caitlin some forty years ago. She learned it from a Dominican nun, Sister Mary de Lourdes, in St. Dominic's High School, Belfast. I have been unable to trace any other source for it. Shortly after finishing the book I checked the words of the song with Caitlin, whereupon I discovered I had misremembered the last line of the first verse, which should read, Du jour annonce les adieux (Announces the day's farewells)." What's striking about this is not that one version or the other lies closer to the atmosphere of the book but that the misremembered line inspired a book that, in the end, could not be served better than by the discovery of the mistake. In For All We Know memory itself resembles a kind of fugue, and each act of remembering rings a change on our lived experience of a past that remains, in what Gould might call the "tune" sense, perpetually unfinished. It is the extraordinary combination of lyricism and storytelling in which Carson captures this idea that makes me want, having finished the book, to return to it perpetually.

About the Author
Wes Davis is editor of an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry to be published next year by Harvard University Press. He has written on British and American literature for publications ranging from the Southwest Review and Parnassus to the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

The Yale Review
New Haven, Connecticut

Editor: J. D. McClatchy
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