Abstract
In “Turn Again”, his poetic “guide” to Belfast and its poetry, Ciaran Carson writes that “Today’s plan is already yesterday’s – the streets that were there are gone”. This essay explores how Carson follows his own advice and how his poetics of rambling have inspired two younger Belfast poets, Alan Gillis and Padraig Regan. All three foreground walking and movement through urban spaces as a powerful literary trope and an effective tool of social criticism. Their anachronistically male or emphatically other personae guide us to the parallel city found between “observation and invention” (Gillis), which corresponds with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the Parisian arcades as a place in which layers of time, space and consciousness coalesce. Tracing trajectories of mutual influencing between three generations of Northern Irish poets can help us appreciate the collapsed hierarchy of time in a society that always threatens to relapse into its earlier confusion.
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