Breaking News

Few poets can alter readers’ orientation as radically as does Ciaran Carson. In Breaking News, this former master of the long line employs two- and three-syllable lines to alter tempo, the time of his narrative, and the distinction between separate wars and eras. The imperial past, which haunts Belfast in its Crimean place-names, its violence, and its scissorblade meeting of different cultures, bleeds into the present. In many of these poems Carson brings into a visual and tactile present of smell and sound and taste radical revisions of paintings, other poems, and bulletins of a war correspondent “to accommodate rhyme and rhythm,” as he says in his notes, or to post, as Pound says of poetry, the “news that stays news.” Winner of the 2003 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection.