Wake Forest University Press

Irish Poetry

Ciaran Carson - Breaking News (clothbound)

Winner of the 2003 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection

In many of these poems, Carson brings an alert, sensual awareness of events as if they were happening now. He radically revises 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."

"Ciaran Carson is the circus act of contemporary Irish letters — a double-jointed marvel who defies the narrow, classifying imagination." Ian Samson, The Guardian


Belfast

east

beyond the yellow
shipyard cranes

a blackbird whistles
in a whin bush

west

beside the motorway
a black taxi

rusts in a field
of blue thistles


$18.95
2003   64 pages   
clothbound
ISBN 978-1-930630-11-6