Breaking News

by Ciaran Carson

Few poets can alter readers’ orientation as radically as does Ciaran Carson. In Breaking News, this former master of the long line employs two- and three-syllable lines to alter tempo, the time of his narrative, and the distinction between separate wars and eras. The imperial past, which haunts Belfast in its Crimean place-names, its violence, and its scissorblade meeting of different cultures, bleeds into the present. In many of these poems Carson brings into a visual and tactile present of smell and sound and taste radical revisions of paintings, other poems, and bulletins of a war correspondent “to accommodate rhyme and rhythm,” as he says in his notes, or to post, as Pound says of poetry, the “news that stays news.” Winner of the 2003 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast and educated at The Queen’s University, Belfast. He knows intimately not only the urban Belfast in which he was raised as a native Irish speaker, but also the traditions of rural Ireland. A traditional musician and a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, Carson was long the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is a flutist, tinwhistler, and singer. He is Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is married to fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and has three children.

He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Táin and of Dante’s Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music. Carson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.

Reviews

[Francisca]

*3.5*

[Mark Papa]

Too minimalist for my taste. Carson is at his best in the longer pieces.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

so different from First Language which is bursting and raucous and as I say anNOUNces itself , Breaking News seems cut-through and minimalist, sparse and sharp it's the subject matter too this is troublesy all the way down and then expands or refracts. very reminded of CK Williams' Falling Ill

[Mark Ward]

this book couldn't have been less for me if it tried