Review
For All We Know (Gallery Press)
Toil and Troubles
George Johnston knows one thing; it’ll be a long time before he sees another collection to rival this one.
This wonderful sequence of poems comes in two parts, 35 poems in each. All of the poems in Part Two follow the same order, each with the same title, as those in Part One. All of the poems in Part One are intricately connected, as are all the poems in Part Two. The same intricate connections exist between the two parts - telling one story from two viewpoints. This remarkable structure is used by Ciaran Carson to present a poetically stunning tour de force.
Sometime in the 1970s, a man and a woman meet in a Belfast second-hand clothes store; a bomb explodes further down the street; they fall in love. For All We Know is their story. In telling it, Carson contemplates life, death, love, loss, memory, forgetting, truth, lies and the sense of place. In ‘Birthright’: “Again you are trapped in the smouldering streets. Knots of men/ armed with axes, files and chisels guard the intersections. / For all that you avert your gaze you know they know your kind”. In ‘Through’, the tragedy of ‘the Troubles’ is measured out, “…Graveside by graveside/I shake hands with men I have not shaken hands with for years, / trying to make out their faces through what they have become”. The tale isn’t confined to Belfast’s grim fastness. In East Berlin, shortly after the Wall’s collapse, an ex-Stasi agent is explaining to the woman the difference between truth and lies: “The lie is memorized, the truth is remembered, he said./ I learned that early on in their school before I became/ interrogator”, (The Shadow).
The most intense part of the love affair is set in Paris and some other, un-named, parts of France. Meditations on music, Bach and the art of the fugue occur in several poems set in Dresden. There are two delightful re-tellings of romantic fairy tales, which allow Carson to show his renowned wit. And always there is the struggle with language itself. “Flaubert labouring for days over a single sentence...Still the interminable struggle with words and meanings./ These words foundering for now over a single sentence” ‘Le Mot Juste’.
It is, however, in what might be called the ‘Belfast poems’ of the For All We Know sequence that the familiar voice of Ciaran Carson is heard. His ability to turn a new phrase shines through. After the bomb explodes, there is “a fall of glass still toppling from the astonished windows” from ‘Fall’. In ‘Peace’: “Back then you wouldn’t know from one day to the next what might/ happen next. Everything was, as it were, provisional, / slipping from the unforeseeable into tomorrow/ even as the jittery present became history”. That “provisional”, in that context, is pure, poetic genius.
The publisher’s back-cover blurb has it that “For All We Know is a sequence of poems like nothing you’ve ever read before”. True; and unless Ciaran Carson puts his pen to another sequence, it’s like nothing you’ll ever read again.
