For All We Know

by Ciaran Carson

This novelistic sequence traces a love story, its repercussions and reprises unfolding what happened or what might have ben in Belfast, Paris and Dresden.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Hardcover

Published March 13, 2008

About the author

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast and educated at The Queen’s University, Belfast. He knows intimately not only the urban Belfast in which he was raised as a native Irish speaker, but also the traditions of rural Ireland. A traditional musician and a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, Carson was long the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is a flutist, tinwhistler, and singer. He is Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is married to fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and has three children.

He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Táin and of Dante’s Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music. Carson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.

Reviews

[Leif]

What a beautiful, jagged, and ultimately mournful book. It's worth reading all through, then read again, and again. Puzzles and memories blur and merge as themes of love and romance flirt with betrayal, history, loss, and the keeping of time that poetry alone promises, a time-kept that might provide some kind of relief ––– if only the relief of a memory come to prominence as it disappears into language's photograph-like grasp.

You had it all mapped out. October was a crisp apple
bitten, with that nip in the air you walked straight out into.

We would meet in the yellowed light of a daguerroeotype
of Paris, by the silent fountain in the empty square,

our rendezvous untroubled by any living presence,
since the camera fails to capture anything that moves.

Few Irish poets today can match the simplicity of love, the starkness of mourning in Carson's devious and yet simply-struck lines.

[Kathy Piselli]

Carson had recently died so I tried this volume of his poetry. It's a wonder. The place, the time, the narrator all are in motion. Some of the bits I like so far: "a fall of glass still toppling from the astonished windows" - I saw this in Beirut in 1975. "When I came to the next day and tried to make sense of it / all the pages were blank and I never saw him again". "I tore up your old shirts the day you enlisted, I said / and sewed the scraps back together in this crazy pattern."

[atito]

hypnotic & recursive -- shd be my favorite thing ! but isn't . but i liked it a ton still if repetitive & at times almost close to bland. i think i felt it depended more on invoking themes that perk intellectual ears (stuck between languages... expensive perfume... tweed jacket) than doing something wholly engrossing linguistically

[Bill Malone]

This collection reads like a wonderful story about a man and woman. It is well worth reading and beautiful. It is full of Paris and Dresden, Bach and watches, clothes, perfumes and love. French is interspersed throughout. The language is clear and accessible, even if some of the ideas are dreamy.