SOURCE: Norfolk, Lawrence. “In a Shower of Belfast Confetti.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4878 (27 September 1996): 12.

In the following review, Norfolk argues that Carson's Opera et Cetera exhibits impressive verbal virtuosity, but in the end seems gratuitous.

Ciaran Carson's fourth collection [Opera et Cetera] grants itself the most meagre initial materials. Two sequences based respectively on the letters of the alphabet and on radio operators' call-signs bracket two shorter groups, the first being glosses on a rag-bag of Latin tags and the second adaptations from the Romanian poet Stefan Augustin Doinas. Somewhere within these perfunctory framing devices, lurking behind a highly untrustworthy “I”, Carson himself is busily at work, boiling up a pot for the requisite (or faux-) alchimie du verbe, slapping up trompe-l'oeil backdrops, and gluing together Airfix kits of “Heinkel, Stuka, Messerschmitt”: the vehicles which will ferry his personae about.

The personae themselves are mostly off the peg...