Ciarán Carson Critical Essay | Critical Review by Christian Wiman

Critical Review by Christian Wiman

SOURCE: Wiman, Christian. Review of Opera et Cetera, by Ciaran Carson. Poetry 171, no. 4 (February 1998): 291-92.

In the following excerpt, Wiman analyzes Carson's style in Opera et Cetera.

Though Ciaran Carson's poems are […] weakened by a style which seems less a necessity than a handy means of making more poems, there is a serious intelligence and inventiveness at work in his latest book [Opera et Cetera]. Written entirely in long-lined, free-verse rhyming couplets, adhering to predetermined patterns (twenty-six poems titled with letters of the alphabet, a series of poems arising out of Latin literary references, another alphabetically determined sequence), and completely without tonal variation, Carson's poems are hardly distinguishable from each other. To some extent, this is a strength. There is an exuberance of spirit in the poems, a playful extravagance and irreverence in both the perceptions and the language which can carry over from poem to...
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