Remembering and Dismembering: Ciaran Carson's Elegies for Belfast

Abstract

This essay considers poems from two of Ciaran Carson's recent volumes of poetry, Breaking News and Until Before After, both in terms of their poetic form and their relationship to the traditional genre of elegy. The themes of memory and memorialisation are explored within poems that are often formally fragmentary and can seem to be dismembering rather than remembering the city of Belfast. The essay suggests that Carson's poetic techniques, particularly in his repeated use of the trope of cartography or mapping, might reflect psychological theories of ‘cognitive mapping’ as a method of memorialising Belfast. Following Edna Longley's suggestion that Carson writes as a ‘post-traditional’ poet, it explores his unique contribution to the development of the contemporary elegy, by tracing the lines of inheritance and subversion from the traditions of the genre. Furthermore, by focusing on work from the mature stage of the poet's career, it also considers how Carson's poetic identity is linked to the city, and how the formal development of his poetry takes place alongside an increased awareness of the poet's need for memorialisation in the face of the dismembering threat of death.