Belfast Twilight: haiku, senryu and micro-poems
Throughout this, Carson's first collection, we get the distinct impression of the poet as an engaged but silent observer, rarely interacting with his subjects, content to pause, note down his impressions, and move on. Indeed, Carson cuts himself as a lone figure: whether walking down an “empty path” in the woods, noting a “kid’s bandstand | all empty now”, or on a Good Friday, remarking on “a man with no saviour | alone on the pier” (a pithy contrast of date and circumstance). Rather than depressing the reader with loneliness, it is pleasing to imagine Carson on his travels, either on a train journey or walking down a rainy street, taking in everything around him, translating the seemingly mundane into sharp poetic assertions, reminiscent of Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.
Throughout these sojourns, there is a longing for the past, or at least, chances to honour the memory of bygone times and objects. “piles of letters on the floor | empty shop”; “closed record shop | filling with dust”; the “empty dresser” with its old fashioned “hooks for teacups” in a “deserted lighthouse”; or a “broken cigarette machine | from bygone days”. All these memories serve not only as a testament to the past, but also as a subtle comment on life in Ireland itself, how one can travel to some small towns or rural, remote parts, and be transported back thirty or more years, progress being somewhat of an alien concept in some areas.
Although the poems largely focus on nature and environments, people also arise in these reflections. The woman who “falls asleep | on her lover’s shoulder” on the night train (taken from a painting by Jack B Yeats) could also be the drunk woman who “combs her lover’s hair” in the sequence ‘Summer Rain’. In that same sequence, the ending note of “still missing mother | after twenty years” harks back to the earlier poem in the collection ‘Mother In Winter” with its closing lines:
old wardrobeafter all these yearsthe smell of mother.
There is little of the speaker in Carson’s poems: often, the sights and facts are presented without commentary, Carson applying the effective economy that should be found in haiku. Because of this, it is all the more striking when the direct ‘I’ or personal testimonies do enter. In the sequence ‘Belfast’, told largely through the voice of the much younger Carson, we get explicit memories of the living through the Troubles:
going to schoola soldier’s rifleaimed at my back…republican marchi know I will never beone of the masked men
In ‘Belfast Night’, the ‘I’ moves to ‘boy’, almost as it the shift to the third person is a means to protect oneself against the deeply sinister nocturnal movements of the conflict. This move does not however lessen the impact, and Carson demonstrates very clearly how such trauma never leaves you, armed men transformed into “a monster” or “a bogeyman” in the boy’s eyes.
The rare use of the ‘I’ is also precisely applied in its single use in ‘Faithful Departed’, with its meditations on brother Ciaran’s funeral:
autumnwearing my brother’s shoesi carry his coffin
Carson creates an impression of connection and inseparability her, and double downs on this by noting his own reflection “in the bus window | my father”. Elsewhere, the opening lines of ‘Island Haiku (Inis Mór) could serve as a small counterpoint to brother Ciaran’s poem, ‘Exchange’:
setting sunin the horse’s brown eyeso soft his nose
Paula Meehan describes Carson as “a watchful observer in constant motion”, and it is certainly a joy to read these poems and to travel alongside the poet, taking in his concise and provoking views of the world and its various enterprises. Belfast Twilight is a powerhouse of a first collection, leaving the reader hungry for more of the same, but satisfied that such testament to the haiku and senryu form exists in the Irish lexicon.