Still Life

Mr Carson is not a gimmicky poet just a good one. He sets down what it’s like to be him, his relationship with his wife, his illness and treatment and his what his local area is like. It’s done in such a way that the local and personal become universal. True and moving. A fine book.

Ciaran Carson was one of those poets who will be remembered for as long as people read poetry. This book is all the more moving for the knowledge of his imminent mortality.

This is a wonderful farewell collection from a poet of great intelligence and vision. I loved it, but then I love his work. Paul Bailey

This last book of Carson’s is up there with his finest.I love the mordant paronomastic wit of its title: ‘Still Life’. Yes, as he writes these poems, he’s still alive—but not, he knows, for very long. And the poems themselves, ecphrastic to a fault (one is literally about one Irish painter’s still life painting, which the poet owns) address the phrase’s other meaning, in its broadest sense: each canvas brimful of life, but at the same time eternally frozen in the stillness of high art. “Below the rock that veils / The cloud”, he writes of a pentimento in one of several paintings by Poussin mentioned in this book, “it seems the city goes on living for the moment, or for ever. I go on writing”. What a wonderful image of mingled evanescence (the cloud) and permanence (the rock), and what a wonderful way of paying tribute to his own art, the art of poetry!Utterly unsentimental and totally lacking in self-pity, these meditations on art and mortality move from diary-like jottings on chemotherapy during one of those tedious but necessary hospital appointments, back to the contents of his own home, on his love for his wife, who moves in and out of the focus from each poem, a marginal but loving presence, to painting after painting, each one a window on the poet’s own soul (and through which we also see our own). “There is always / Something else to see in everything we see”.Technically these loose, long, cunningly wrought lines (never quite as casual or informal as they seem at an initial glance) remind one of C K Williams. But where the American poet is angry and passionate, Carson is cooler, more tranquilly alert to the movements of mind through the grey light of each new often softly rainy day. These are lucubrations, not tirades. They are properly meditative instead of self-inquisitorial or self-lacerating. Where troubled and nightmarish memories surface from the time of Ulster’s Troubles---the Troubles that helped to sting a younger Carson into magnificent song---they are seen through a haze of distance; and while that distance hardly lends enchantment to the view, it does allow the poet to contextualise the whole mysterious process of recollection within the more dispassionate present moment.This is a book that should be on the shelf of every lover of British and Irish poetry.