Critical Essay | Critical Review by John Lucas

Critical Review by John Lucas

SOURCE: Lucas, John. “Changing History.” New Statesman and Society 3, no. 112 (3 August 1990): 42.

In the following excerpt, Lucas praises Carson's Belfast Confetti.

There's so much going on in Ciaran Carson's new volume [Belfast Confetti] that it's impossible to do more here than offer a few pointers to its riches. First, then, the title. The phrase crops up, menacingly and/or enigmatically, in several poems and is glossed in one of the many-layered prose pieces that regularly punctuate the second, middle section of the volume. “Brick” offers a meditation on the material out of which Belfast is built—just as others debate the origins of the city's name, its geography, its history. “The subversive half-brick, conveniently hand-sized, is an essential ingredient of the ammunition known as ‘Belfast confetti’, and has been tried and trusted by generations of rioters.”

The disturbing wit of that phrase is echoed throughout the volume, which...
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