On the Night Watch

$13.95

Following the publication of Collected Poems, and the critically acclaimed For All We Know, Ciaran Carson has produced in just over one short but powerfully felt year two extraordinary volumes of poetry, Until Before After and On the Night Watch. Like its companion volume, On the Night Watch moves within the tight emotional spaces of worry and waiting that characterizes a period of illness in the family, creating an echo-chamber in the short-lived sonnets of this volume. The intricate and yet spare allegory of these poems details the arduous ways in which we try to cope with life’s hardships.

Reviews

“With this sequence of tiny, haunting poems Carson—venturesome as ever—may be wanting us less to read in the conventional sense than ‘to watch / what never seems / to alter’ as you run frame after frame of a film reel through your fingers.”
– The Sunday Times (London)