Still Life

by Ciaran Carson

In Still Life, Ciaran Carson guides us through centuries of art and around the Belfast Waterworks where he walks with his wife, Deirdre; into the chemo ward; into memory and the allusive quicksilver of his mind, always bidding us to look carefully at the details of a painter’s canvas, as well as the sunlight of day. This master translator chooses here to translate the painter’s brush with the poet’s pen, finding resemblances, echoes, and parallels. A thorn becomes the nib of a writer’s pencil and the pointed pipette of a chemo drip entering the poet’s vein. Yet, Deirdre stands as much in the center of these poems as do the paintings. At times, the two seem to escape into the paintings themselves: “Standing by the high farmstead in the upper left of the picture—there!—in a patch of / sunlight. … They could be us, out for a walk.” Balancing the desire to escape into the stillness and permanence of art with the insistent yearning to be fully present in each moment, Carson reminds us—“Look! … There!”—that in the midst of illness, even in the face of death, there is, still, life.

Genres: Poetry, Ireland

88 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2020

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

[Khrustalyov · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has taken me quite some time to get round to reading Ciaran Carson's final collection of poetry. I think that I have been almost scared to do so, scared to approach this set of poems that was written in the dying days of his life and with the knowledge of his impending death. I was scared too, I suppose, because over the past five or so years his poetry, prose, and translations have come to mean a great deal to me and, having read almost all of his published work, I was perhaps scared that somehow this final collection would either disappoint my expectations or bring my peculiar passion for his work to a close. Indeed, it is a passion that I cannot wholly understand myself let alone express, except perhaps to say that it has made me see the place that I am from in a different light. Not a better light, exactly, nor even a clearer light, but rather a light that has cast as much shade as illumination. It has made me see Belfast and Northern Ireland in something like the chiaroscuro light of the Flemish paintings Carson so often wrote about.

Still Life is a collection that could only be written by a dying poet. Ostensibly the poems are inspired by paintings that have meant something to Carson, each one meditating in a different way upon life and death, often referring to Carson's own radio- and chemotherapy in a diary fashion, almost always addressing themselves to his wife Deirdre Shannon, and with a sense of indelible and quiet joy at life itself. This is not a raging into the night nor a collection of regrets, but nor is it a rapturous hymn to life. Rather, the poems collected here - many of which refer back and forth to ideas in a slow build of narrative elements - speak to the desire to simply keep on living one's usual life and to continue seeing the world around oneself in new ways.

This idea of seeing the world in a different light is a strong theme within the collection. The paintings that Carson discusses - often by Poussin, but also by contemporary Irish artists - seem to open up new ways of seeing Belfast to him. Not particularly special places in Belfast, but simply his own front garden, the Waterworks park, or a new development on his street. Details pop out like those of one of Poussin's landscapes, mundane details of breezeblocks or tabby cats becoming visceral and teeming with life. And these locations that are common to the writer begin to hint at a sense of confinement to his locale, perhaps due to his illness. But within the everyday he finds so many minor miracles.

The way that these poems relate to paintings and, in some cases, refer back to lines of the same personal narrative in other poems in the collection, makes it difficult to think of them each as separate pieces. They are rarely simply meditations on or descriptions of paintings, which function more often as springboards to seeing aspects of Carson's own life in a new way or remembering something from years ago, usually relating to him and his wife. These memories are, according to the poems, hard to place in time, and this emerges as a theme of importance in the collection, the inability to place memories in a chronology, something that we might imagine Carson is trying to do as he looks back on his life at the end of it. In the poems he does not seem to be frustrated by this, however, but in the end sinks back into memories of simple things in the houses he lived in, thinking about how much he loved the mundane details of life, never regretting or raging, only setting down a final testament that seems to say I was in a place at a time and I lived it and remember it more or less and loved so much of it.

I do not think that this collection will bring my interest in Carson's work to a close. Indeed, the final poem is replete with allusions to his earlier poems, just little fragments of lines or titles of collections, and I do not think I have noticed the half of these allusions. So, I had best go back and find out what I can see anew, what I can see differently in the light of this final poetic statement from one of the greatest and most versatile of poets of recent generations.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ciaran Carson died October 9, 1070, a fact that his biography here on Goodreads does not reflect. These poems were written in the months before that when Carson knew he was dying. I don't know of other works written when the writer knew he did not have long to live, but I assume they exist. One might imagine that such works don't stand up to previous works, considering the poet's health. I would argue that in this case, Carson's work is as thoughtful and deliberate as ever. His beloved city of Belfast is centered and lovingly present. His wife Deirdre is at his side as he walks the city, walks which inspire his poems. Carson was a remarkable poet and he is greatly missed. He was also a phenomenal translator in a number of languages. If you have read other Northern Irish poets, but no Carson, your knowledge of contemporary Ulster poets is incomplete.

[Melody Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ciaran Carson’s Still Life meanders through paintings, memories, his Belfast street, and chemotherapy to find new meanings in the everyday moments that make up the end of his life. With each poem inspired by and named after a specific painting, he takes time to wander through the paintings and the various associations they spark in his mind. The collection feels like a long, slow walk through Carson’s thoughts, through everyday life, and through Belfast’s past. The poems are grounded in their sense of place and time, often directly stating street names and dates, and occasionally referencing days or thoughts from earlier poems. I believe the collection is meant to be read slowly from start to finish, while looking at each painting, and with the intention of letting your own mind wander to new places as Carson’s does. It’s also meant to be picked up again over the years, reread, and ready to spark new insights, just as the paintings are always coming back to Carson in new ways throughout his life and poetry. These poems will not only give you a new appreciation for art, but will also make you want to live a long life, full of wandering and rethinking and discovering new ways to see the world that surrounds you.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very charming book of poems the author wrote with each named for a work of art and the artist. Each of the poems used the artwork as a launching pad to express thoughts about art, the artist, nature, mortality, love and devotion, work, home....

The poet had passed away shortly before I was to take a trip to Belfast, and his books were the first I searched for in a Belfast bookstore near Queen’s University.

The poems are lovely to read on a quiet day or when you need a bit of quiet in your mind.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was surprised at how moved I was, after a year without being able to see any painting in person, to spend a couple of afternoons with google images and a master poet at the end of his life while he points out details of some of his favorite works. How I will miss this poet, whose work I have just started to explore.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up at Half Price Books as I saw each poem represented a different art work. I had never heard of the poet, but the idea was neat to me. After reading one or two I looked the poet up and learned he wrote this while undergoing chemo for a cancer that would claim his life.

This added layer of life and death imbued Carson with a perspective which was fascinating to read. Even in adversity beauty can be found in the every day of life, even the beauty of memories. Further, it’s left me asking the power of art and its power to capture life and death and perhaps, even to go beyond the two.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5⭐️

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still Life by Ciaran Carson
Wake Forest University press 2019

There’s a picture of Ciaran Carson on the back cover. He’s sitting on a bench seat. Tall buildings, trees and streetlights provide a diminishing perspective taking the eye towards an approaching bus. The bus is slightly out of focus. There’s something, perhaps someone on a bike, in front of it.

The word dapper presents itself to describe the poet. Hat, blazer, tie. The refinement of a white handkerchief in the breast pocket. The facial expression is harder to read. Perhaps a hint of a mischievous smile? Perhaps Puckish is an appropriate description?

In a book of poems about pictures, this one seems carefully arranged. Perhaps you know the story. You walk into the woods and meet a well-dressed man on a path you didn’t mean to take. He’s usually sitting on a log, or a style. If you share something with him, you’ll be rewarded with a story, though the story might take up several lifetimes and when you return to where you started, you’ll find the world has changed.

There’s an inviting space beside him on the bench. I would offer him the OED’s etymology of dapper, which I think he would enjoy. It suggests dapper was adopted at the end of the ME period ‘with modification of sense, perh ironical or humorous’ since in Middle Dutch it meant ‘powerful, strong, stout, energetic’, which might be superfluous to requirement, as the saying goes. Mod Dutch gives ‘valiant, brave and bold’ and they don’t seem appropriate either.

I want to thank him for ‘Last Night’s Fun; in and out of time with Irish music’, one of my favourite books, for ‘For all we know’, one of the most interesting of poetic narratives, and for the pleasure of all the other poems, translations and the weird and wonderful prose.

But of course, I can’t. He’s dead.

The first poem in the book concludes:

It’s beautiful weather, the 30th of March, and tomorrow the clock’s go forward.
How strange it is to be lying here listening to whatever it is is going on.
The days are getting longer now, however many of them I have left
And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily outlast their end. (p. 13)

Carson died in October 2019. Still Life was published posthumously that November. It’s inevitable that those two facts colour any response to the book. They don’t need to. The book doesn’t need your sympathy.

On a first reading the poems seem colloquial, easy to read, informative, with moments of arresting imagery:

‘My dreams are filled with wavering buildings, avalanches of astonished/glass.’ (p. 19)

In characteristically long lines, with their deceptive appearance of artlessness, each poem is a reflection on a picture, which provides the poem’s title. ‘Reflection’ is inadequate because the colour and detail in each painting is a focal point, not always the beginning or end: ‘Because when looking at a thing we often drift into a memory of something else/however tenuous the link’ (p. 15).

But ‘reflection’ is also apt because the pictures become distorted mirrors which reflect the observer’s life and pre-occupations. Each viewing is a reviewing, no matter how familiar the he thought the picture was. The silent present ‘you’, often Carson’s wife, Dierdre, notices things he hasn’t. Things unnoticed re-present themselves, and perception and memory shuffle the elements into new versions of the picture.

A Carson poem is typically not a hermetic object which I think is one of the reasons he was a fascinating writer. An intelligence was moving through time and space and recording the process.

The last poem ends:

And I loved the buzz of the one-bar electric heater as a bus or truck passed by
And I loved the big windows and whatever I could see through them, be it cloudy or clear
And the way they trembled and thrilled to the sound of the world beyond. (p. 84)

The key phrases here are ‘whatever I could see’ and ‘the world beyond’.

There is no ‘high and low culture’, no misplaced sense that some things aren’t ‘appropriate’ subjects for poetry. The verbal registers move from colloquial to technical. Wittgenstein may be quoted, but he’s just as much at home as the small pot of daffodils broken by an idiot vandal, or the memory of ‘blue birds anticlockwise spiralling around the interior of the toilet bowl’ (p. 84).

Carson once described a traditional music session:

Every tune recalls other circumstances in which it has been played; and the conversations and anecdotes sparked off by the tunes are essential to a good session. It’s a mix of tunes, songs, stories, drinking, eating- whatever happens to be going on, including smoking in the days when you could smoke in bars. (Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (ed) Ciaran Carson, Critical Essays, Four courts Press, 2009 p.15))

Think of each poem not as a single tune but a recording of the whole session. It’s an astonishing achievement, and he sounds like no one else.

I’d just found the book I had in mind-What Painting is by James Elkin-
When the vandal struck. Thud. What the…? The gate clanged. I looked out
The bay window to see a figure scarpering off down the street to the interface-
What a book though. I have it before me, open at this colour plate, jotting notes
Into a jotter, which I’ll work up later into what you’re reading now. (p. 11)

The poet doesn’t live in self-imposed exile on Parnassus, occasionally sending his effusions to the plebs below. Street names map a real Belfast and anchor him into the daylight world. You can reconstruct his daily walk which is recorded in many of the poems as possibilities on a map. Google maps and virtual art galleries, acts of minor vandalism, the insertion of a drip into the arm, a cat eating a bird, all find their way into the poems. Memory skips backwards, to bomb blasts, early attempts at writing, school days. A concern with the mechanics of writing is always present: the pen he’s using, the breaking of a pencil, memories of a typewriter, words and their possibilities. Sounds too are included, like the phone and the doorbell, the post man interrupting him while writing, but unlike that person from Porlock, the interruptions kick the poem onward.

However, although the poems are separately titled, this is a sequence and the intelligence and craft are in the architecture and that may not be immediately obvious on a first reading. The poems pick up, echo and alter words, phrases, and images. The more you look for the links, the more there are.

As a single example, which doesn’t exhaust its own possibilities.

The sixth poem in the sequence is ‘Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm 1650-1651’ . Although this is the first of three paintings by Poussin to be used as a title, the artist appeared in the first poem, where his habit of reaching among Roman ruins for a handful of marble and porphyry chips and saying to a tourist; ‘Here’s ancient Rome’ stands at the beginning of the book as a short hand for Carson’s method.

The sixth poem also refers explicitly to the second poem, ‘Angela Hackett, Lemons on a Moorish Plate 2013’, in which, ‘a fortnight ago’ Carson had placed a blackbird to sing from a blackthorn ‘for the sake of assonance’. He’s driven to look up the difference between blackthorn and hawthorn. Which also evokes the tune ‘The Blackbird’.

But the poem also sets up what comes afterwards. Carson records his daily walk and for the first time mentions Number 1 Hopewell Avenue, ‘a beautiful house back then’ now a building site. The construction work here will become one of the markers of time passing as subsequent visits in later poems will record the developments on the site. ‘We’ remember the Goldfinch ‘you saw’ ‘two years ago’ and so on and so forth…You can pick up a phrase, a word or a detail and watch it move through the poems, threading them together.

The most obvious link is the movement of time, which is not straightforward. Time moves forward as an accumulation of present moments, some dated, some sequenced by incidents. Time moves backwards to memory, some also dated. What is most obviously missing are references to the future.

Time is also built into the complicated game Carson plays with the idea of the poem as a record of its own performance. The pictures might look like time frozen, but the poems often create the impression of a performance in progress, unfolding.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the book, given the context, is that these poems manage to escape categories like ‘Personal’, ‘Autobiographical’ or ‘Confessional’. Just as a Carson poem can challenge your idea of what a poem is and does, these labels are called into question because the poems are paradoxically none of them, and all of them.

It’s easy to imagine someone else in this situation, not knowing if they were going to live, writing self-indulgent or embarrassingly personal poems. But here a craftsman is taking pleasure in his craft and inviting the reader to share his enjoyment.

Like the encounter with the man in the story, once you start paying attention, it’s hard to escape. The book invites rereading. Those possible etymologies of ‘dapper’ which seemed initially inappropriate are perhaps apt after all: the poems are indeed ‘powerful, strong, energetic’, ‘valiant, brave and bold’.

(This review first published on the Brazen Head Web Site)

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

MARCH

by Ciaran Carson

Finish date: 07 March 2022
Genre: Poetry
Rating: A++++
Review:

Personal introduction These poems moved me, surprised me, delighted me. After Ciaran Carson had been told his lung cancer was terminal...he wrote his last book. Still Life is a a set of 17 meditations on paintings. The publisher delivered the finished book to his family just after Ciaran died (1948 - 2019). When I learned about Carson's personal circumstances wondered with all the themes and things to write about what does a dying man choose to be in his last book? What did Carson want to share with us?

Good news: For people who don’t read poetry…you can read these poems as if they were emails (letters) sent to you. There is more rhythm and pattern than rhyme.

Good news: This poetry collection was just a delight to read. The book felt like a visit to a museum with a good friend. You know, just meandering along the paintings and exchanging your thoughts or memories to a welcoming ear. The freedom to share just any observation from the shadows of yellow daffodils, the jiggles or jabs of a brushstroke (Monet)…to a coagulating egg white in the kitchen of a bodega. (Velazquez)

Bad news: Carson includes 3 poems on paintings by N. Poussin. I found this a bit too much…3 the images were semi-dark mythical scenes and the comments were lackluster. There are so many other artists he could have chosen…missed opportunity.

Good news: I was introduced to Belfast artists: Gerard Dillion, Basil Blackshaw and James Allen Blackshaw’s ‘Windows I-V’ was Carson’s choice. IMO he should have highlighted the artist known for his impressive studies on windows: Maitsse.
Reading recommendation “Henri Matisse Rooms with a View”.
by Shirley Neilsen Blum (no photo)

Blackshaw DID impress me with his portrait of Brian Friel (see Google). James Allen…I love the colors he uses, the shades of 1960s Neapolitan ice-cream that remind me of David Hockney. (See Google: House With the Palm Trees)

Personal: This is not just a book of poetry…it is a lesson in art history with a whiff of the of the everyday-ness in life. The only sad note is…the poet knows his end is near.
The artists chosen 5 from France, 3 from No. Ireland, 2 from England, and 1 each from Italy, Wales, Spain and Belgium. I was MOST impressed by the life and paintings of French artist Yves Klein...a world of Madonna blue, Chagall blue, duck-egg blue..just beautiful! If you have the time it is worth looking at his Wikipedia page…and of course read Ciaran Carson’s Still Life !

NOTE Here is a link to my review on bookblog....with more images of paintings I refer to in this review: My Thoughts

[Queen Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Carson's last book of poetry. He wrote it knowing he was dying of cancer. Each poem is a reflection on a different painting. Each poem also drifts into his daily life with is wife as they take their daily walks, go the hospital for his chemotherapy treatments, and visit the galleries or museums, or even their own bedroom, where the various paintings are hung. Many. if not all of the poems wander sometimes into a stream of consciousness type of musing. I poems were lovely as poems, but also gave me a new appreciation for the art -- most of which I had to look up -- look up the painting and view it yourself before reading the poem, then again after you've read the poem, in many cases he saw things I did not, or at least noticed things/emphasized things in the paintings I did not, not all of which could be explained by age, gender, and nationality differences. the poems also had me thinking about death, mortality, why is that despite the fact we all know we are mortal, it seems it takes an actual diagnosis of impending demise to make us live in the moment, be more present? A bit of Mary Oliver and May Sarton-esque. Why am I not writing meditations on paintings that inspire me? Maybe I'll write my own poems about the same paintings and the things I noticed that he didn't or perhaps more correctly, the things in the paintings that moved at the time I am viewing them that are different from the things that. moved him when he viewed them in the last months of his life. I will be keeping this book out, not shelving it for awhile.

[Bryan Dahl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leave it to me to discover a poet through his final collection. These were beautifully simple and meditative poems that work together as parts of a single work, often referencing back to places and people mentioned earlier. They are diaristic, talking about the poet observing paintings, strolling around town going to and from chemo treatments, and reminiscing to times when he lived in Ireland during the Troubles. Definitely great for people who don’t enjoy poetry stuffed with abstractions. Overall highly recommended even for people who don’t read poetry.

[Bill Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carson’s gift was association, of images to words. The catalyst that propelled him, as revealed by Michael Foley in the 3-20-20 edition The Irish Times, was smoking dope late into the night, so that he could then write all night.

[Dr. des. Siobhán · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good compilation of poems about or set in Belfast. While I do not remember a single one right now (title-wise), I remember vivid images, which counts for something. (I should really start writing reviews earlier, my short term memory is a problem.)

[Elena · Rating 3 out of 5]

a book so small I lost it in my library stack for like 2 months. apologies to Patrick Henry library. I liked this, but I’m not sure this much ekphrasis at once is my thing. however, I love reading about Belfast, so I did enjoy that a lot.

[Ida Boardman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely beautiful

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

[Natalie B · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s such an element of love to this collection.

[Julie Gardner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting read and I enjoyed it despite the fact that I found many of the poems difficult to access due to the length of the sentences and the layout. For me, it didn't work as poetry but it did engage me on a human level. That raises questions of course. I can see I'm going to have to keep thinking about this collection.