‘Carson is a poet of sustained authority and resourcefulness, arguably the best writing in English to have emerged in the past twenty-five years.’
— Michael Hinds, The Irish Times
A mere nine months since the publication of On the Night Watch (and that book appeared within a year of his acclaimed For All We Know and Collected Poems), Until Before After accumulates as an intriguing meditation on the passage of time and the persistence of love. Miraculously, this ever-shapeshifting author distils form to a new austerity while comprehending the ‘imponderable / toll time // takes’. Acts of recreation and creation, of forgetting and remembering, fathom ‘the mine-shaft // of until’ and relate how the present moment is constantly threatened — and, by definition, defeated.
‘Otherwise / is where we are,’ he writes, following a series of heart-rending hospital scenes, before ‘both took that step / over a threshold’ in an instance of recovery and return, a haunting presence and continuing present, that prevails in a shared intimacy of feeling and the single notes that become a music that is made and played together.
