Reviews

Ciaran Carson's new collection offers us love poetry as elegant and mysterious as its heroine, Francophine Nina . . . It is also an intricately-worked psychological and political thriller, where bombs in the streets of 1970s Belfast echo the fire-bombing of Dresden. Like his award-winning 2003 collection, Breaking News, which addressed the Crimea, Carson's For All We Know locates the Troubles within the wider Euorpean theatre of war.

This is a marvellously shifty book, in which every narrative may be a lie . . . Carson's formal conceits are the ver opposite of arid.  . . . Each would be resonant by itself; together they create a strategy, not illustrating this shadowy story but instead deepening and complicating it.

For All We Know is rich with mystery, wise to the shadows events and possibilities cast on each other; . . . It would be unfair to give away the ending. But Carson's resolution is satisfying and necessary even as it throws us back on ourselves, and on big human questions about time, identity and the 'Forest of Language'. That it does so at the same time as performing the elegant footwork of fugal self-reference, and in a music which resonates still more profoundly at each reading, makes this touching, masterly book unique. If there is a canon, For All We Know will surely enter it.
                                                                                                                       — Fiona Sampson, Poetry Review

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