Abstract
ABSTRACT The rivers in Ciaran Carson’s Belfast Confetti (1989) reconceptualise agency and time in histories of power and conflict. While scholars have examined how poets like Seamus Heaney, Moya Cannon and Derek Mahon depict deep time, scholars of Belfast Confetti have focused on processes of naming, mapping and surveilling ethno-religiously and socio-economically divided populations. Extending such analyses to representations of Belfast’s riparian environment in Belfast Confetti reveals a dialectic of nonhuman and human histories. The ongoing interactions of these histories co-constitute social and material environments in ways that preclude erasure of even the most submerged, rerouted or culverted histories. Carson’s poems show the rivers of Belfast to be agents of change in histories that persist in the city’s material foundations. Ultimately, Belfast Confetti reimagines Belfast as a complex intermingling of geologic, linguistic, textual, industrial and political histories that reframe time, environment and agency in contemporary Irish poetry.
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