SOURCE: Howard, Ben. “The Evolving Art of Ciaran Carson.” Shenandoah 48, no. 1 (spring 1998): 98-111.

In the following essay, Howard traces the gradual inward movement of Carson's poetry, culminating in Opera et Cetera.

Among the leading writers of Northern Ireland, no one is more protean than the poet Ciaran Carson. And no one's work embodies more contrarieties, thematic and formal. Born in Belfast in 1948, Carson came of age in an atmosphere of political conflict, and like others of his generation he has borne witness to sectarian violence. Yet he has dealt with the Troubles on his own terms, opting for black humor and intellectual satire rather than elegiac lyric or bardic lamentation. A scholarly, erudite poet, whose interests include history, linguistics, cartography and philosophy, he has explored the intricacies of dialect, the etymologies of place-names and the interrelations of the Irish and English languages. Yet in his most original poems...