Like MacNeice's poem, Carson's ‘Belfast’ conveys, both formally and at the level of content, an image of the city as starkly divided. 3 The city, in all its historical and topographical complexity, serves both as an abiding if not omnipresent frame of reference and as a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson's work. Neil Corcoran has said that Carson is ‘pre-eminently, the poet of Belfast in its contemporary disintegration’, 2 and Peter Barry regards his poetry as ‘relentlessly loco-specific’, its imaginative texture bearing the indelible imprint of the city's urban materiality. Belfast is a ground that Carson's writing returns to again and again, finding it altered each time but also reworking the spatiality of its social life after its own fashion. However, in spite of this propensity for variety there is little doubt that the city of Belfast occupies a central place within Carson's heterogeneous texts, functioning as a sort of imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns – music, language, narrative, memory, history – are arrayed, like spokes on the hub of a wheel. He is restlessly inventive in his experiments with form, combining and reworking a wide range of poetic structures and metres with elements adapted from fictional and non-fiction prose narratives, music and popular song, the visual arts and vernacular speech patterns. Carson's oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, is in many ways remarkably diverse and eclectic, ranging as it does across generic, geographical, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries with seeming effortlessness and voracious enthusiasm, insistently placing ‘literature’ within the constellations of a wider universe of discourse and deliberately eschewing distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms. It is the purpose of this chapter to set out a critical framework for exploring these engagements in their widest manifestations. 1 My contention is that the singularity of Ciaran Carson's writing rests upon his far-reaching imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place, and particularly urban spatiality in an Irish context.
Each reading constitutes ‘an appreciation, a living-through, of the invention that makes the work not just different but a creative re-imagination of cultural materials’. The singularity of a literary work, argues Derek Attridge, is best understood as an event in which the reader experiences both inventiveness and alterity.
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