Reviews

Only last year, the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson published For All We Know, a book-length poem inviting readers to assemble from two enigmatic pieces the story of a relationship conducted in an atmosphere of danger and paranoia. With On the Night Watch he goes a stage further, daring another elaborate experiment recalling some kinds of minimalist verse (by Americans such as Robert Creeley) written in the 1950s.

There are three “movements”, adding up to 126 poems. Each has 14 lines (seven couplets) of rarely more than five syllables each, and the final line of every third example supplies the title of a subsequent poem. Thus, one that ends “We do not know/how all this//came to be/nor how we stand//dazzled in/this field of eyebright” recurs in the title This Field of Eyebright three pages later. There is no obvious plot line, only mysterious, elusive images, and the effect is never­theless riveting. “Eyebright” is one of various repeated words, and since eyebright is a medicinal herb there is an impression of an ­emergency medical context. 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.
                                                                                   — Alan Brownjohn The Sunday Times, 19 July 2009

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