Belfast Confetti

This book could be read as its own text, or as a companion to the author's previous book, The Irish for No. This volume takes on many of the same places, people, and themes, and uses the same groundbreaking poetic line sprawling across the page to recreate the eight-bar rhythm of traditional music. But this book is also distinct: its short discursive essays give it the narrative feel of somebody letting you in on the secrets of his own life, and the darker tone reminds you that you have traveled to the other side of the poet's mind. The extensions from the previous volume begin very explicitly, with the title, which comes from a poem in TIFN. The Exiles' Club, who were the center of a poem in the last book, now come up as the subject of an essay in this book. But the book reads like the aftermath of a car bomb, with body parts strewn throughout the titles (Hairline Crack, Bloody Hand) and memorials to notable acts of violence ("The stopped clock of The Belfast Telegraph seems to indicate the time / of the explosion -- or was that last week's?"). This book could easily have a wider audience than most books of poetry. For students of history, lovers of literature, Celtophiles, and those curious about the mind of the victim of violence, Belfast Confetti can be both an education and a very grim pleasure to read. Be warned, you can't read it too quickly, or the darkness will tear you down in a hurry; this is a book to be consumed in sips, not huge gulps. But it is a book to be consumed nevertheless, and enjoyed for as long as it lasts.

"Belfast Confetti", along with Carson's 1987 "The Irish For No", are the most impressive volumes of poetry I have read in recent years. I could (and do, as an English student) pour over the poems for hour. He is wonderfully skilled at interconnecting his work and setting a real sense of place. Carson explores Belfast and the way the city and its people have changed in the last four decades or so since his youth. He is concerned not with judging the changes, but in examining the ways in which the Troubles, the English presence, and modernization have affected Belfast/Northern irish culture and the way his own memory betrays the truth as it falters. These are rich books, they keep you looking over & over for more layers. I also reccommend, if you can find it, his 1997 prose work, "The Star Factory". Its themes and subjects tie right back in with BC and TIFN.