Ciaran Carson and the Theory of Relativity

Abstract

Ciaran Carson’s poetry collection Until Before After (2010), written while Carson’s wife Deirdre was seriously ill, turns and returns to sickness and the spectre of death. However, it finds some relief from anxiety and grief in the interweaving of poetry and theoretical physics – specifically, in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Both space and time, the volume contends, are observer-dependent; we do not exist on a linear continuum, and so life and after-life are actually simultaneous. As one contemplates being-towards-death, Carson indicates, these insights can be surprisingly therapeutic. Additionally, traditional music provides the basis for a new, non-Euclidean worldview in Until Before After. As Carson’s work on traditional music suggests, the genre can evade conventional measures of time. For instance, sometimes “a good musician can produce a pulse against the ostensible rhythm of the tune”, a technique that Carson calls “double entendre – like hearing two beats at once”. Until Before After borrows such double entendres from traditional music, allowing the poetry to offer a kinetic, relativistic, non-linear means of apprehending space and time.