- Paperback: 80 pages
- Publisher: Picador (21 May 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330373692
- ISBN-13: 978-0330373692
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 1.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 267,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
‘Carson is one of the most original poets now at work in this country’ John Banville
Book Description
This compendium, made from Ciaran Carson’s previous collections, reveals one of the most remarkable and sustained tours de force in contemporary poetry: the poet’s reimaginign of his native city of Belfast. Carson introduces the reader to a city as full of surreal narrative and imaginative possibility as Borges’ Buenos Aires or Calvino’s Venice; at the same time he never shirks from taking a hard look at the city in all its political and cultural complexity. In its refusal to simplify or romanticize, The Ballad of HMS Belfast is an indispensable guidebook to a city few will know exists. ‘He is the master of the long line; these poems are manic, frightening and funny, and somehow manage to catch the tone of life in modern Belfast’ John Banville, Irish Times ‘It is about Belfast past and present and is full of surprises, savage and witty, human and extravagant. His voice is truly original, both intelligent and passionate’ A. S. Byatt, Sunday Times Books of the Year
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
'The Ballad of HMS Belfast' collects Carson's poetry about Belfast from over a decade of prolific writing. He should not be seen simply as a 'Belfast', or even a 'Troubles' poet, but it is in the exploration of the city and its nature that his concerns about language, violence and life find their fullest expression. He is justifiably famous for poems like 'Belfast Confetti', which attempts to describe the way in which violence proscribes conventional language, and "The Irish for No", which examines the relationship between maps, history, memory, and Northern Ireland's fraught language conflict. Both these poems are the title-works of other collections, but brought together here with the other poems in this anthology they are thrown into a new light.
The style of the poems hovers somewhere between a very immediate idiosyncratic speech and a more formal, 'poetic' diction. The long line lengths (for which Carson's later work especially is known) create the impression that we are listening to an overheard pub conversation, full of familiar references and private jokes, yet on closer analysis they prove to be replete with meaning and with an almost lyrical quality in the sound and rythm of the words.
The Belfast that emerges from these poems is very far from the stereotypes in which it is usually described. The violence, the constant presence of the security forces, and the sectarianism all play their part, but they form part of an ever-changing map of the city, a map that is created day to day by the very real, very human narrators of Carson's poems.
The style of the poems hovers somewhere between a very immediate idiosyncratic speech and a more formal, 'poetic' diction. The long line lengths (for which Carson's later work especially is known) create the impression that we are listening to an overheard pub conversation, full of familiar references and private jokes, yet on closer analysis they prove to be replete with meaning and with an almost lyrical quality in the sound and rythm of the words.
The Belfast that emerges from these poems is very far from the stereotypes in which it is usually described. The violence, the constant presence of the security forces, and the sectarianism all play their part, but they form part of an ever-changing map of the city, a map that is created day to day by the very real, very human narrators of Carson's poems.
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