from Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 25, Number 1

"That Blank Mouth": Secrecy, Shibboleths, and Silence in Northern Irish Poetry

David Wheatley

University of Hull, England

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The poetry of contemporary Northern Ireland has been among the most highly praised and widely read of any in English since the emergence in the 1960s of the generation of writers that includes Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon. All are complex, allusive poets who have achieved popular readerships despite the presence in their work of much that resists being easily understood by readers who stand outside their poetry's densely local, mythic, and, on occasion, private references. This aspect of their style is particularly evident in the work of writers such as John Montague, Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Ciaran Carson, whose roots lie as much in the Gaelic as in the English-language tradition. Writing on the proliferation of "cloaked references to Gaelic culture or Irish history" in modern Irish writing in English, Dillon Johnston identifies "two kinds of unstated or suppressed references":

first, those omissions introduced to frustrate a colonial auditor and convey secrets to a primary audience, and, second, those omissions introduced into a song or story when the fuller context is lost over time or simply dropped because in a place as small as Ireland everyone knows the plot.1

Johnston contrasts this secretiveness with English models such as Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads, with its commitment to a pellucid colloquial register, and Philip Larkin's aversion to poems decked out in the arcana of what he disparagingly calls the "myth-kitty." Possible roots for this cultural opposition can be found, Johnston reminds us, in Counter Reformation habits of secrecy or equivocation, conferring poems with the metaphorical equivalents of "priests' holes [and] secret rooms" in which to conceal their deeper meanings.2 In a contemporary context, these habits take on new resonances as historical themes and memories combine with the self-consciously Modernist techniques of Heaney's place-name poems or Carson's fantastical cityscapes of Belfast in the Troubles. In these poems, secrecy and indirection become both subject and means, as the poet attempts to satisfy the impulse to flee the brutality of a violently divided society, while simultaneously realizing that there is no escape and that the signs and symbols of division are coded into the most apparently innocuous subjects. All language teems with dangerous possibility, needing the corrective example of silence to keep it in its place; "Whatever You Say Say Nothing," Heaney famously instructs himself in the title of a poem from the second section of North. The value of silence is trumpeted, even as the silence is breached in the selfsame act. In "The Stone Verdict," for instance, we read of the poet's recently dead taciturn father:

It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.
He will expect more than words in the ultimate court
He relied on through a lifetime's speechlessness.3

In commemoration of the dead man, "Somebody will break [the silence] at last to say, 'Here/ His spirit lingers,' and will have said too much" (Heaney, p. 17). In repeating the speaker's lapse into speech, Heaney pointedly flouts the code of manly silence which he professes. The poem, that is to say, calculatedly tropes rather than literally upholds its suspicion of speech. In many different ways, Heaney and other Northern Irish poets deploy strategies of silence, secrecy, private reference, and tribal shibboleth rather than "blabb[ing] out."

Although these strategies may superficially appear to work against self-expression, in reality they can yield up unsuspected layers of meaning in the most unusual ways. The precedents for this in Irish literary tradition are as frequently comic as they are elegiac or tragic. Confronted with a section devoted to the Irish language in The Best of Myles, a miscellany of the Ulster novelist Flann O'Brien aka Myles na gCopaleen's columns for The Irish Times, non-Gaelic-speaking readers may be tempted to move along swiftly to the next chapter. As an admission of defeat, this would be somewhat premature, since, on closer inspection it emerges that many of these Gaelic columns are not quite as inhospitable as they appear. An illustration to one passage hints at colonial confrontation of some kind. An official-looking type is scrutinizing a document at a table while a group of soldiers searches the room; the dejected bystanders, we assume, form the subjects of this military attention. The characters are given names from Irish folksong, such as Sheán O Duibhir a' Ghleanna and Eamon a' Chnuic. Some of their conversation is in Irish, but most is, in fact, in English, transliterated into Gaelic orthography. The tableau ends with the rebels confronted with the evidence of their sedition:

Shean O Duibhir: Namh deintilmein díos docúmaints ár bhéarigh sióruigheas, iú hav nó reispeict for ló and óirdiur—

Fear na mná ruaidhe: God séabh dé Cbhín.

Sheán O Duíbhir: iu sbheign;

Sheán Buidhe: Aigheam glad tú saoí dat bhun obh iú ios loigheal. Reilís thim and loch de odars up, só dat dé mé leirn tú bí gúid and loigheal suibdeicts obh thur mós gréisius maidistigh. Díos tú ár a disgréis tú thur aighrís suibdeicts.4

[Shean O Duibhir: Now gentleman these documents are very serious, you have no respect for law and order—

Fear na mná ruaidhe: God save the Queen.

Sheán O Duíbhir: you swine;

Sheán Buidhe: I'm glad to see that one of you is loyal. Release him and lock the others up, so that they may learn to be good and loyal subjects of her most gracious majesty. These two are a disgrace to her Irish subjects.]

As a mini-drama of Irish problems with language and the law, this recalls a celebrated passage in James Joyce's early journalism. Writing for a Triestine newspaper, Il Piccolo della Sera, in 1907, Joyce described the case of another Myles/ Miles: his near namesake Miles Joyce, an Irish-speaking peasant from the West of Ireland on trial for murder in an English-speaking court. "The figure of this dumbfounded old man," he wrote, "a remnant of a civilization not ours, deaf and dumb before his judge, is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion."5 What for Joyce was emblematic of tragic cultural alienation, in Myles na gCopaleen's hands has become matter for scholarly farce. The divide between English, the language of imperial law and order, and Irish, the language of secrecy and treason, is blurred in a ridiculous hybrid. Neither one extreme nor the other, this nonsense language illustrates a failure of communication, but one that produces a surplus rather than a lack of signification, for those who can crack the Milesian code.

"All great poetry is written in dialect," Craig Raine has written, with Dr. Johnson's description of Milton's language as "Babylonish dialect" in mind. "It follows," he goes on, "that [ . . .] it is all poised between sense and non-sense."6 Joyce and Myles na gCopaleen are just two examples of the long historical precedents in Irish writing for this dialectal no man's land between sense and non-sense, silence and incomprehension: "Hirp! Hirp! for their Missed Understanding! chirps the Ballat of Perce-Oreille," as Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake,7 a work before whose exacting tribunal it is the fate of many readers to stand deaf and dumb.

While strategies of evasion, codes, shibboleths and other language games are now standard postmodern fare, there are obvious reasons beyond the literary Zeitgeist why these devices come into particularly sharp focus in contemporary writing from Northern Ireland. In the past three decades and more, the Troubles have provided an inevitable and tragic backdrop, warping their social deformations into the fabric of Northern Irish writing. Challenged by events that defy representation, from the mid-1960s onwards Northern Irish poets and playwrights have made of language itself a site of contestation. Comparing Andrew Marvell to Heaney, Longley, Mahon, and Muldoon in an influential essay, Christopher Ricks wrote of the artistic implications for a society rent by civil war: "first, an intense self-reflexive concern with the art of poetry itself in poems; and second, a thrilled perturbation at philosophical problems of perception and imagination," contributing to the prevalence of what he terms the "self-inwoven simile" in these writers' work.8 Superficially, images of non-communication would appear to point towards un- rather than inweaving of poetic detail, but as the example from Myles na gCopaleen shows, there are many ways in which communication fails to fail so totally that something, however bizarre or unexpected, does not get through. Silence itself may be unchanging, but in the words of another connoisseur of non-communication, Samuel Beckett's Malone, "The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness."9 Among the forms of this formlessness which demand examination are the works of Friel, Heaney, and Muldoon, and especially, the poetry of Ciaran Carson.

The classic example of dramatically exploited linguistic confusion in recent Irish theatre is Brian Friel's Translations, about the impact of the Ordinance Survey, whose job it is to render all Gaelic place names into English, on the Irish-speaking community of Baile Beag in Donegal. In a simple but brilliant dramatic coup, all Irish-language dialogue in the play is given in English, although it remains incomprehensible to the non-Irish-speaking Royal Engineers. This allows Friel to make the non-communication of culturally alien groups dramatically viable; it should be pointed out, however, that just as Irish is silently elided into English, the dichotomy of these alien groups also results from a strategic elision, since Friel has chosen to ignore the roots of the Ordnance Survey in Irish antiquarianism, the better to present it as a blunt instrument of colonial administration.10 In one passage of multi-layered irony, the young woman Maire pronounces a sentence in English ("In Norfolk we besport ourselves around the maypoll" [sic]),11 in a "strange" accent because of her difficulties with the language that she (or rather, the actor playing her) is of course already speaking. At times this device leads Friel into straightforward absurdities, as when Doalty "derives" the word "conjugation" from the Latin conjugo (Translations, p. 25), a plausible enough result until one remembers that the Irish word for conjugation is not derived from and sounds nothing like this Latin root. By making Irish so all-important and yet invisible at the same time Friel strengthens the association that he makes between language and a condition of almost mystic inwardness. When the guardsman Yolland becomes infatuated with Donegal culture and tries to learn Irish, he is forced to recognize his lack of entitlement, whatever his linguistic skills:

Even if I did speak Irish I'd always be an outsider here, wouldn't I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won't it? The private core will always be . . . hermetic, won't it? (Translations, p. 40)

For the first half of the play, these cultural misunderstandings are more humorous than anything else, but in the one passage in which the Irish language is used, the colonial difference reasserts itself in implacable and irreducible form. Yolland has gone missing, and fearing the work of local malcontents, Captain Lancey announces a series of measures to be taken unless he returns, ending with the leveling of all houses in a list of townlands, he reads in English, with Owen translating. Threatened with being wiped off the map, in every sense, the original place-names become tokens of impotent authenticity, signifying only themselves in the harsh new dispensation. Immediately afterwards, Lancey begins to question Sarah, who has a speech defect, asking her name. The terrified girl symbolically "closes her mouth" (Translations, p. 62), the combination of political menace, language barrier, and speech defect erecting a powerful obstacle in the way of communication.

Mention of place names and language inevitably calls Seamus Heaney to mind. His classic statements on this theme are the toponymical poems of Wintering Out such as "Anahorish," whose place name shades into the place itself, with its "soft gradient/ of consonant, vowel-meadow," and "Toome," which begins with the poet again taking vocal possession ("My mouth holds round/ the soft blastings,/ Toome, Toome.")12 The scale of commentary that these poems have provoked is in striking disproportion to their slender dimensions, to the point where they have become as fought over as the place-names they trope. W.J. McCormack states the case against perhaps the best-known example of all, "Broagh," the townland whose rhubarb-blades "ended almost/ suddenly, like the last/ gh the strangers found/ difficult to manage" (Wintering Out, p. 27):

place is presented as an oral achievement in these poems, the enunciation of sounds which are infinitely refined, unique, beyond the ability of "the strangers" whose attempts to manage the specific consonant they had visited are nicely cast in the perfect tense, "found." In these last lines some occupation, some mastery by strangers has been resisted (if not repulsed) by the language/ landscape.13

While there is undoubtedly a substantial component of linguistic nostalgia in "Broagh," to see the mastery of the place-name as a surrogate for the repossession of the territory from the same "strangers"—and thus a covert piece of nationalist pugnacity—would be to oversimplify. As has been noticed by favorable and hostile critics alike, despite the Gaelic origin of the place name in bruach, meaning "riverbank," nowhere in the poem does Heaney limit the mastery of its difficult gh sound to Protestant or Catholic.14 Further, the poem contains many words ("rigs," "docken," "boortrees"), which, although also difficult for the stranger, are of Ulster Scots, not Gaelic origin.15 And lastly, despite the British army's being the most obvious candidates for the "strangers" of the penultimate line, there is strictly nothing to stop the phrase's applying to passing French or German tourists, unfriendly as this may seem. The poem is thus both excluding and, in a strange way, reconciliatory; although judging the poem "based on a convenient fiction," Neil Corcoran finds "Broagh" a "celebration of exclusiveness, we might say, in the interests of local inclusiveness" (The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, pp. 45–46). The unifying vocable presages in microcosm a culture unified enough for the term "strangers" no longer to carry overtones of sectarian division. Nevertheless, and for all these subtleties, the fact remains that "Broagh" identifies this utopian hope with a localized speech-act or shibboleth, failure to master which carries severe consequences and ultimately exclusion from its imagined community. Heaney's younger contemporaries are far less confident about drawing such equivalences between local belonging and poetry's utopian content.

A poem such as this exemplifies the sort of fastidious and, to an outsider, perhaps exasperating preoccupation with local detail that Philip Larkin has in mind in "The Importance of Elsewhere" when he speaks of "The salt rebuff of speech,/ Insisting so on difference," although Larkin goes on to speak of this very quality being what "made me welcome": "Once that was recognised, we were in touch."16 Heaney refuses to extend so easy a welcome, questioning the universality of pastoral conventions and preparing the way for the assault on his own easy-going, youthful pastoral style that will come in his fourth book, North (1975). Part of the reason for his withholding assent from a universally inclusive language, except as a function of a utopian future, is Heaney's knowledge of the baleful power of what Yolland called "the language of the tribe." The prose poem "England's Difficulty," published at the same time as North, offers an example of this tribal language in its title, coming as it does from the slogan "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity." The speaker says of himself:

An adept at banter, I crossed the lines with carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported back to nobody.17

Instead of rejecting the coerciveness of the checkpoint interrogation, familiar from poems such as "The Frontier of Writing," Heaney internalizes it and applies it to his own speech. By reporting "back to nobody," he underlines the gratuitousness of his behavior, but also its secretiveness, the acquired watchfulness of his speech.

Another striking example of this, again from Wintering Out, is the poem "Bye-Child." Here, according to his author's note, Heaney writes about an idiot child "discovered in the henhouse where [his mother] had confined him. He was incapable of saying anything." But as with Sarah in Translations, his silence is reconfigured as a form of eloquence in its own right:

But now you speak at last
With a remote mime
Of something beyond patience,
Your gaping wordless proof
Of lunar distances
Travelled beyond love. (Wintering Out, p. 72)

The child's silence is exemplary of his innocent patience and undemonstrative love, but these qualities are crucially beholden to the poet, through whose agency they "speak at last." The impediment of dumbness is accorded its dignity, but only from the controlling position of the fully capable speaker. The question of poet as spokesman is crucial to North, in which Heaney alternately exults in and interrogates his role as poetic sponsor for the silent bodies recovered from the bog. It is the poet of "Bye-Child," however, whom we must to keep in mind and contrast with the more disturbing strategies of Muldoon and Carson.

* * * *

The work of Paul Muldoon has long been a point of comparison for readers of Heaney; in a recent essay, Neil Corcoran has argued that the two men's work forms the most important interrelationship (personal and intertextual) of any among Northern Irish poets.18 But as Corcoran shows, it is a relationship driven (on Muldoon's side) by scepticism as well as admiration, ranging from mild joshing to outright slander (the implicit characterization of Heaney as Southey in Madoc springs to mind). If Muldoon's readings of Heaney appear in his work in coded form, they do so in keeping with the spirit of private jokes, coded utterance, and secrecy that animates so much of Muldoon's poetry. The title of one of his most celebrated volumes, Quoof, is itself a secret, "a family word for hot water bottle" which Muldoon carries to bed with him as he sleeps with a woman in New York, who in any case speaks "hardly any English."19 Published as it was in the aftermath of the Republican hunger strikes of 1981, Quoof puts its interest in secrecy to frequent use in the volume's many poems on political themes. One such exemplary poem is the elliptic quatrain "Mink":

A mink escaped from a mink-farm
in South Armagh
is led to the grave of Robert Nairac
by the fur-lined hood of his anorak. (Quoof, p. 28)

Captain Robert Nairac was one of the most notorious British undercover agents in Northern Ireland, a Grenadier Guardsman who worked as a liaison officer for the SAS and RUC20 in South Armagh, traditionally the most fearsome of Republican strongholds; he also figures in Michael Longley's "On Slieve Gullion." Before its escape the mink's body had been due for industrial processing, just as according to legend Nairac's body was disposed of in a meat processing plant, his body never having been found after his abduction and murder. The unknown whereabouts of a grave bear emotive resonances in Irish politics: the location of Robert Emmet's grave is famously unknown, while more recently attempts have been made to locate the graves of abducted and disappeared Irish Republican Army victims. Commenting on the mink sniffing out Nairac's grave by "the fur-lined hood of his anorak," Tom Herron has written of "the futile attempt to find partnership, to establish connections."21 Where Heaney's metaphors in "Broagh" are utopian and connective, freely conjoining the language and landscape, Muldoon's metonymy is grimly dissociative, with only an anorak standing in for the corpse, which, in any case, holds no interest for the mink who finds it.

As an undercover agent moving between communities, Nairac has much in common with the slippery Gallogly and Mangas Jones of "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants," the long poem with which Quoof ends. Carrying out intelligence work in the Republican community, Nairac was famously reckless in his attempts at disguise, dressing in cowboy uniform and speaking in a Belfast accent beneath which his Ampleforth, Oxford, and Sandhurst background was all too obvious.22 One result of his close contact with the Catholic community was his strategy document, "Talking to People in South Armagh." In it Nairac stresses the need for sensitivity to the shibboleths involved in addressing the locals: "Never ever use the words INFORM, INFORMATION, WITNESS or INTIMIDATE. Never write anything down; it smacks of police work. Never offer money for INFORMATION." The aversion to writing is an almost parodic embrace of oral culture by a representative of the intelligence-gathering security forces, but it is part of the general drift in Nairac's remarks away from a model of brute domination to a more subtle hegemony, based on verbal cajoling and manipulation. In a list of "Useful Euphemisms," he outlines some of the ways in which the cultural divide can be obscured in mannerly small-talk: rather than "Can you give me any information?" the agent should say, "Perhaps you might be able to help"; for "The Provos are stupid murderers," "Some of the boys have gone too far"; and for "Your son is a terrorist," "Your son is taking up with a bad crowd."23 The watchwords for the successful agent should be tact and cunning understatement, qualities Nairac himself so singularly failed to display. Nevertheless, his warning against using the word "inform" showed a sound instinctive grasp of Irish history. As James Joyce, a writer for whom betrayal amounted to a controlling obsession, wrote in his early article "Il Fenianismo," "In Ireland, at the proper moment, an informer always appears" (Critical Writings, p. 189).

For Muldoon, all language is shadowed by the threat of betrayal, against which it defensively encodes itself in forms such as the cryptic "Mink." In the case of Madoc, an entire volume is presented as a massive rebus, while in "Capercaillies" from the same book he smuggles a cheeky acrostic about a well-known American magazine down the left-hand margin. The more recent collections, The Annals of Chile and Hay, explore audacious rhyme schemes, with poems rhyming between one book and another, onomastic puns, excavated etymologies, and other flamboyant writerly signatures. Frequently, Muldoon introduces an extra dimension of self-reflexivity by troping on the production of sound itself, and treacherous sound at that. In "Third Epistle to Timothy," from Hay, Muldoon once again demonstrates the process by which sectarian difference is graphed onto and in turn read back from language. The poet's father has hired himself out as a servant boy on a Protestant farm, where he is treated as a figure of suspicion:

"Though you speak, young Muldoon . . ." Cummins calls
up from trimming the skirt
of the haycock, "though you speak with the tongue
of an angel, I see you for what you are . . . Malevolent.
Not only a member of the church malignant but a
malevolent spirit."24

Later on, Muldoon describes the kidnapping by Republicans of an octogenarian county grand master of the Orange order, the improbably named Anketell Moutray,25 an act which turns the poet's thoughts to Land League affrays and other agrarian unrest, culminating in another image of literally linguistic violence:

It shall be revealed . . .
A year since they cut out the clapper of a collabor . . . a collabor . . .
a collaborator from Maguiresbridge. (Hay, p. 100)

As we heard from Captain Nairac, no one is more steeped in infamy in Irish history than the informer, perhaps explaining Muldoon's stuttering unwillingness to pronounce the word "collaborator," allowing as it does for a near-homonym on "clapper" in the same line, not to mention clabaire, Irish for clapper and also meaning "an open-mouthed person." The collaborator's mouth is open only so that its tongue may be cut out.26

* * * *

But more even than Muldoon, it is the Belfast-born Ciaran Carson who has explored the poetry of secrecy and shibboleths. Like Flann O'Brien, Ciaran Carson was raised in an Irish-speaking household, learning English only when he went to school. After a promising first collection in 1976, The New Estate and Other Poems, he observed a creative silence of over a decade before re-emerging with the universally lauded The Irish for No in 1987. The collection's title carries an echo of "Ulster Says No," the slogan of Unionist resistance to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, as well as providing Carson with a foolproof exemption from the binaries of Ulster politics: there is no Irish for no, or yes either, for that matter. Thus, it is not just the Paisleyite slogan that fails to translate, as Carson shows by debating with his companion on how to render into Irish the slogan of the Ulster Bank, "the Bank that Likes to Say Yes": "The Bank That Answers All Your Questions, maybe?"27

Carson's Belfast is, to borrow Roland Barthes's phrase for Japan, an empire of signs, and one possessed of all the inscrutability of orientalist cliché. "Snowball" begins with the words "All the signs," before listing the paraphernalia of 1960s femininity ("beehive hair-do, white handbag, white stilettos, split skirt") (Irish for No, p. 44). The woman disappears to an unknown destination past the loading bay of "Tomb Street GPO," on what the poet guesses is a blind date, but like her fishnet stockings "everything is full of holes." The holes in the poem's continuity are temporal as well as spatial: next day the poet awakes to a postcard inviting him to "Meet me usual place & time/ Tomorrow", but dated 9 August 1910. As Corcoran has written, the "card in a hole in a Tomb" is "a very dead letter indeed."28 Carson's father worked as a postman, and in "Ambition" we read that his jokey franking of a letter with the harp on the back of an Irish ha'penny led to his never being promoted: more important matters than dead letters fall through the net of circulating signifiers that is Belfast's empire of signs.

The inscrutably arbitrary sign returns in "Calvin Klein's Obsession," which goes in search of the past by way of its associated tastes and scents. An opening taste of beer reminds the poet of the Ulster Brewery, which reminds him of the perfume Blue Grass and the fur worn by an old girlfriend. The glorious insubstantiality of the woman from the past could not be further from the exhumed female figures of North. What he felt for the girl, "infatuation," "Was a vogue word," hinting at the magazine in which these various perfumes are advertised and heightening the sense of artificiality so that "it wasn't all quite real." Later, he wonders of the Blue Grass fragrance, "How often did she wear it anyway?" and "can it still be bought?" The blurring of experience is heightened by a (not quite accurate) quotation from Edward Thomas' "Old Man": "I sniff and sniff again, and try to think of what it is I am remembering."29 Earlier in that poem Thomas puzzles over the disjunction between name and object: the essence of the herb "Old Man, or Lad's-love" "clings not to the name," but as he adds, "And yet I like the names." What makes Carson's woman so wraithlike is also what keeps his feelings so strong, inhabiting as she does a condition of pure anonymity: "For there are memories that have no name." The memories proceed through buying snuff for his grandmother to, by association, a list of perfumes from the 1930s and 1940s, until in the final lines, the poet remembers his childhood habit of wearing his mother's high heels and breathing in the "flesh-coloured dust" of her powder compact. "Or maybe it's the name you buy, and not the thing itself," the poem wistfully concludes (Irish for No, p. 25).

In "Belfast Confetti," a poem that shares its title with his next collection, Carson makes the chaos of violence scriptable in metaphors drawn from writing and printing, but in ways that emphasize its explosive effects on any pretence of realist representation: as the riot squad move in "it was raining exclamation marks,/ . . . a fount of broken type," while an explosion makes "an asterisk on the map." The poem ends with what sound like existential questions ("What is/ [m]y name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going?"), but which in the context are almost certainly the barked enquiries of a policeman, "A fusillade of question-marks" (Irish for No, p. 31).

Military intelligence, surveillance, and codes play a ubiquitous role in Carson's work; when, as often happens, Belfast Confetti registers some difficulty in communication it is as though the writer is experiencing a form of technical interference or static. Maps feature frequently, too, and typify this representational difficulty: the prefatory poem "Turn Again" describes maps with an excess of information ("a map of the city which shows the bridge that was never built/ A map which shows the bridge that collapsed; the streets that never existed") and maps that are covered in blanks ("the shape of the jails cannot be shown for security reasons.")30 Rather than brand them inadequate to the absent reality, Carson insists on the fluid nature of the city itself, in the Borgesian formulation "[t]he city is a map of the city" (Belfast Confetti, p. 69). In "Serial," Carson says of a hotel in the border county of Fermanagh that

since the Ormsby
Room in Lakeland still remains un-named, they are thinking of
calling it
Something else: not a name, but the name of a place. (Irish for No, p. 51)

How can the room be unnamed, we wonder, if Carson tells us its name. The prospect of giving somewhere "not a name, but the name of a place" is reminiscent of the White Knight's distinctions among his song, the name of his song, and what the name of his song is called in Through the Looking Glass.31 There may be a private joke here on the name of Carson's poet contemporary Frank Ormsby; equally, in what is a running joke in Carson's work, a reference to Carson is not to the poet himself but, of course, to his namesake Edward, the bellicose and fanatical founder of modern Unionism.

It is not just what they represent that makes maps and writing suspect; the very materiality of their inscriptions too shows signs of untrustworthiness. In "Queen's Gambit," we read of the "frottage effect":

the paper that you're scribbling
on is grained
And blackened, till the pencil-lead snaps off, in a valley of the
broken alphabet. (Belfast Confetti, p. 35)32

Even the most functional forms of writing fall short: the T and r of a shop called Terminus are missing in "Gate," leaving the school grade-like message "e minus," appropriately enough, as the failed shop is advertising a closing-down sale (Belfast Confetti, p. 45). A tea-stained copy of The Irish News in "Queen's Gambit" blurs the text to the point where the paper is "difficult to pick up without the whole thing coming apart in your hands" (p. 38), not unlike the devices of which the poem speaks elsewhere. Speech too is only intermittently susceptible of representation. While two winos can "converse in snarls and giggles, and . . . understand each other perfectly" (Irish for No, p. 40), where more is at stake, the system of codes and secrecy asserts itself more strongly. Someone whispering into an answer phone does so as into a confessional box, giving secret details of "names, dates, places" (Belfast Confetti, p. 37). Soldiers enter a chemist shop and seem to "spit word-bubbles" at the assistant, but

Much of this is unintelligible, blotted out by stars and
asterisks
Just as the street outside is splattered with bits of corrugated
iron and confetti. (Belfast Confetti, p. 33)

The confetti here, as in the title, refers to the "conveniently hand-sized" (Belfast Confetti, p. 72) half-bricks and other detritus used by rioters for lobbing at the security forces. If Belfast's red-brick façades are synonymous with Victorian industry and respectability, these half-bricks confirm their altogether different associations with their alternative labels "heeker" and "hicker." The confetti image here suggests street violence through linguistic defamiliarization, but in "Jump Leads" Carson powerfully suggests a far more violent scene by apparently returning the word to its more familiar sense. The poem describes a news report of a murder:

Everything went dark. The killers escaped in a red Fiesta
according to sources.
Talking, said the Bishop, is better than killing. Just before the
Weather
The victim is his wedding photograph. He's been spattered
with confetti. (Belfast Confetti, p. 56)

The journalese of "according to sources" and the Bishop's pious enjoinder exist within the bland continuum of reportage that allocates the murder victim a minute or two before moving on to the weather, although not before we have seen him in a wedding photograph. In a stark reduction, the victim "is" his photograph; the coldness of this contrasts with the sociability of the occasion recorded, a wedding, at which the victim has been "spattered with confetti." Imprisoned in its repackaging for the news camera, the celebratory confetti has become unmistakably deadly in meaning, just as in "All the Better to See You With" it forms part of a dark retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story. Later, in "Queen's Gambit", the poet is listening to a barber talk about a republican operation, uncomfortable that he may have been mistaken from his short hair for an ex-prisoner. The mirror he looks into is used by Carson to mirror his unease, although here too images go aslant:

And I've this problem, talking to a man whose mouth is a
reflection.
I tend to think the words will come out backwards, so I'm
saying nothing (Belfast Confetti, p. 39).33

Other examples of Carson's defamiliarizing technique appear just as he seems to extend the reassuring hand of cliché: "I know this place like the back of my hand," he tells us in "Question Time" (Belfast Confetti, p. 57); but in "Bloody Hand" he has already reminded us that the Red Hand of Ulster originates in an act of mythic self-mutilation, "hacked off at the wrist and thrown to the shores of Ulster" (Belfast Confetti, p. 51). And as he says in "Question Time," "who really knows how many hairs there are, how many freckles?" on the back of a hand, repeating his scrutiny of the same cliché in the earlier poem "33333."

"The Mouth" again shows Carson dispersing a violent subtext beneath superficially harmless clichés: "There was this head had this mouth he kept shooting off" (Belfast Confetti, p. 70). When matters deteriorate for the overly loquacious mouth, "provisionally," it has become inevitable that "[b]y the time he is found there'll be nothing much left to tell who he was." Heaney's articulation of his identity on behalf of the dumb boy in "Bye-Child" looks like an act of benevolent sponsorship; here identification at second-hand has become gorily forensic, a piecing together of dismembered body parts whose powers of expression have been viciously extinguished.34

Puzzling over the etymology of Belfast in the prose poem "Farset," Carson has recourse to the Irish-English dictionary of Father Dineen, who offers a generous array of meanings for the word fearsad: "a shaft; a spindle; the ulna of the arm; a club; the spindle of an axle; a bar or bank of sand at low water; a deep narrow channel on a strand at low tide; a pit or pool of water; a verse; a poem" (Belfast Confetti, p. 48). Taking the last of these meanings, Carson suggests a translation for Belfast as "mouth of the poem," for which he derives an extra sanction from the fact that one of the other meanings of fearsad, a "turn in the furrow," is a secondary meaning of the Latin versus (Belfast Confetti, p. 49). Readers of Muldoon's Clarendon lectures, To Ireland, I, will recognize the tone of straight-faced jiggery-pokery behind these fanciful etymologies, but Carson is not the first writer to notice Father Dineen's madcap polysemousness. Myles na gCopaleen offers the example of a sentence that could be translated uncontroversially as "It is entirely a new thing that a symphony concert should be held in conjunction with a Gaelic choir"; when put through the Dineen mill it comes out as "It is longitudinally a strong anxiety that a wise and vigorous ancient Irish ale should be in moderato time at once with an unsophisticated troop" (Best of Myles, pp. 277–78).35 Where a return to etymological roots in Friel or Heaney offers the chance of digging down to solid and authenticated ground, in Carson's hands it has become akin to opening a never-ending series of trapdoors under the fabric of his poems. Standing in for a language whose speakers, like Flynn in the poem "Dresden," can call on thirteen words for a cow in heat, Carson's "second language" is no less zany, nor the linguistic maps he draws up in it any more reliable.

One of the final poems in Belfast Confetti, and one of Carson's most powerful, is "John Ruskin in Belfast." Although not picked up on by Carson, "Revised Version" earlier in the book offers a possible reason for Ruskin's attraction to the city, with its allusion to George Macartney, "Sovereign of Belfast in the late 1600s," who described the city as a "second Venice" (Belfast Confetti, p. 67). Carson cites "The Mystery of Life and Its Arts," a pastiche Ruskin text in which the critic ascribes Irish neglect of "[e]xternal laws of right" to their "strange agony of desire for justice," their tormented national character blocking their ability to pursue aesthetic excellence. For (Carson's) Ruskin, the religious art of Old Irish missals is childlike and artificial, while an angel he describes is tellingly, or rather untellingly, short of a crucial detail:

See how in the static mode of ancient Irish art, the missal-painter draws
his angel
With no sense of failure, as a child might draw an angel, putting red
dots
In the palm of each hand, while the eyes—the eyes are perfect circles, and,
I regret to say, the mouth is left out altogether.

Carson comments:

That blank mouth, like the memory of a disappointed smile,
comes back to haunt me.
That calm terror, closed against the smog and murk of Belfast:
Let it not open
That it might condemn me. Let it remain inviolate. (Belfast Confetti, pp. 97–98)

Unlike Heaney in "Bye-Child," Carson makes no attempt to act as intermediary for the silent figure, choosing instead to honor its "inviolate" silence. This is not an act of trans-historical solidarity such as we find in the poems about silenced figures from the past by Carson's contemporary, Eavan Boland; Carson fears that if the angel did speak, it would be to condemn him. He refuses to flatter us with artificial claims for his ability to bridge the divides of history; nor will he turn this failure into forms of self-castigation in which the guilty poet (as so often in Heaney and Boland) is placed center-stage.

If the title of Carson's 1993 collection, First Language, suggests a Heaneyesque at-homeness in his idiom, the inclusion of a preliminary poem in Irish reminds us that what follows is, in the title of the volume's second poem, in Carson's "Second Language."36 John Goodby has argued that this and Carson's more recent work represent "a brave move beyond the communal and local material of the earlier collections to an investigation of the principles which underlay them,"37 a shift reflected in the "hieroglyphic alphabet," "Typewriterspeak" and "general boggledybotch" of their new style, to use the book's own self-description.38 What First Language has in common with Opera et Cetera (1996), is Carson's application of his semiotic method not just to his stock themes of traditional music, military intelligence, and the urban labyrinth, but more and more, and more self-consciously too, to the surface of language itself. The first of the four sequence that make up Opera et Cetera, "Letters from the Alphabet," extrapolates from Rimbaud's great sonnet "Voyelles," with its synaesthesic character sketches of the five vowels. Working through all twenty-six letters, Carson allows the abecedary accidents (to give an example of my own) of the English language to guide the course of his poems. Thus, "A" is about a Stealth bomber whose Alpha wing carries an Ampère-wired Ampoule-bomb.39 For the eighth letter of the alphabet, Carson begins with an incident about a change of contractor for the provision of sausage rolls to the prisoners in Long Kesh, Belfast's notorious H-shaped prisons. The prisoners complain, but trivial-sounding as the incident is,

We cannot reproduce his actual
words here, since their spokesman is alleged
To be a sub-commander of a movement deemed to be illegal.
(Opera et Cetera, p. 18)40

Under the terms of broadcasting legislation, it is the prisoner's voice that is unacceptable, whether he uses it to talk about politics or the size of prison sausages; by lip-synching his words, the phonocentrically superstitious authorities prevent him generating his own oxygen of publicity. Outside the prison, it is again the nature and grain of the voice heard on the news rather than what it says that attracts attention. Carson draws on the fact that the aspirate/non-aspirate pronunciation of the letter h functions as a sectarian marker in Northern Ireland, in a way the broadcasters have evidently mistaken:

His "Belfast" accent wasn't West enough. Is the H in H-Block aitch or haitch?
Does it matter? What we have we hold? Our day will come? Give or take an inch.
Well, give an inch and someone takes an effing mile. Everything is in the ways
You say them. Like, the prison that we call Long Kesh is to the Powers-that-Be
The Maze (Opera et Cetera, p. 18)41

The difference between opposing tribal shibboleths ("What we have we told," "Our day will come") is insignificant, or no more significant than the inch which Carson considers giving or taking. Even the mile that will follow from unwisely giving the inch, however, is an alphabetic quibble, an "effing" mile, just as the powers are powers that "Be," all lost in the "Maze" of their confusions. The second sequence, "Et Cetera," continues Carson's assault on monoglot verse by assigning familiar Latin tags as titles to each section. The third, a set of translations from Romanian, is suitably titled "Alibi," while the last, "Opera," is based on radio operators' code, which spells out another alphabet from "Alpha" to "Zulu." This final poem recapitulates the verbal self-inweaving that is now the dominant note in Carson's work. Beginning by imagining himself as a Zulu soldier, he dances round soldiers like "a hound of Baskerville" (Opera et Cetera, p. 92). A description of his soldier foes as "typecast phalanxes" hints irresistibly at Baskerville type and the fictive nature of the battles that Carson fights "foraging behind the alphabetic frontier," in "the gargled doggerel of this dumb poet." The reference to his dumbness is a reminder that, unusually or not for this celebrant of the oral tradition, Carson has a pronounced stutter, in reaction to which he exults in the silent freedom of reading and writing, as in this poem. Hence the description of his speech, when he does talk, as "garbled doggerel," compounded by the play with codes, shibboleths, and silence which even as a child, Carson learns to view as allies rather enemies of what he wants to say.

In Captain Nairac's terms, his is a poetry that may "witness" but never "informs," in all the ambiguity of the latter term. Like Muldoon, Carson is a writer forever "insisting so on difference," to the point of misunderstanding and even incomprehensibility. Rather than obscurantism on his part, however, this refusal to treat his medium as one of transparent limpidity is richly productive rather than preventive of poetic effect. Carson's stance is not unlike the angel at the end of "John Ruskin in Belfast," from the "sealed tomb" of whose mouth come the words "Be thou there/ Until I bring thee word." The angel's words to the Holy Family are a source of comfort amid the Massacre of the Innocents that the poem describes, even if what they say is only that the angel will speak again some time in the future rather than anything more immediately reassuring. The mix of supernatural comfort and impotence is a perfect emblem for the relationship to his tragic subject matter that characterizes Carson's poetry. Speaking, or rather not speaking for a whole tradition in Irish writing that places silence at the heart of its understanding of speech and poetry, Carson's angel could be relied on to satisfy the dead man of Heaney's "The Stone Verdict": when his blank mouth finally opens to speak, we can be sure that whatever he says, it will not have been "too much." As Northern Ireland enters a new phase and younger talents such as Peter McDonald, Martin Mooney, and Conor O'Callaghan come to maturity in post-ceasefire, post-Belfast Agreement Ireland, Carson's work remains exemplary; in Auden's words for Yeats, "A way of happening, a mouth."42


1 Dillon Johnston, The Poetic Economies of England and Ireland, 1912–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. xiv.

2 Johnston, p. 180.

3 Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 17.

4 Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles (London: Grafton Books, 1987), p. 262. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as Best of Myles. It is unclear whether "Shean O Duibhir" and "Sheán O Duíbhir" are intended to be the same person.

5 The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 198. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as Critical Writings.

6 Craig Raine, "Babylonish Dialects," in Haydn and the Valve Trumpet (London: Picador, 2000 [1st ed., 1990]), p. 89.

7 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 175.

8 Christopher Ricks, "Andrew Marvell: 'Its Own Resemblance,'" in The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 34–35.

9 Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Pan, 1979), p. 181.

10 Cf. J.H. Andrews, "Notes for a Future Edition of Brian Friel's Translations," Irish Review, XIII, (1992/93), pp. 93–106.

11 Brian Friel, Translations (Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 15. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as Translations.

12 Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out (Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 16, 26. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as Wintering Out.

13 W.J. McCormack, "Seamus Heaney's Preoccupations," in The Battle of the Books (Gigginstown: The Lilliput Press, 1984), p. 37.

14 Among the many critics to have written about Heaney's place-name poems are Tom Paulin and Graham Martin, "Seamus Heaney's 'Broagh,'" The English Review, II (1992), pp. 28–9; Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 98–101; David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993), pp. 24–26; Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (Faber and Faber, 1998 [2nd edition]), pp. 43–49; and John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950 (Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 154–58.

15 Corcoran, p. 46 (hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as The Poetry of Seamus Heaney). C.I. Macafee's ground-breaking Concise Ulster Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1996) gives "brough" or "broo" as an English naturalization of bruach, although among the other meanings listed for "broo" are "a witch who can turn into a hare," "the edge of a potato ridge," and "unemployment benefit," suggesting that madcap polysemousness, too, is shared by Gaelic and Ulster-Scots traditions (see the discussion of Carson's prose poem "Farset" for more on Gaelic polysemousness).

16 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 104. For a comparison of Heaney and Larkin that touches on "Broagh," see James Booth, "Larkin, Heaney and the Poetry of Place," in James Booth, ed., New Larkins for Old: Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 190–212.

17 Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 85. The pamphlet of prose poems from which "England's Difficulty" is taken, Stations (Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975), has never been reprinted.

18 Neil Corcoran, "A Languorous Cutting Edge: Muldoon versus Heaney?" in Poets of Modern Ireland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 121–36 (136).

19 Paul Muldoon, Quoof (Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 17. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as Quoof.

20 The Special Air Service (SAS) and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) are, respectively, a British special forces unit and a traditionally Protestant-dominated police force; the presence of both in South Armagh has long been a source of Republican grievance.

21 Tom Herron, "Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Dispersed Body," in Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland, ed., Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity (Macmillan, 1999), p. 204.

22 Toby Harnden, 'Bandit Country': The IRA and South Armagh (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), pp. 211–24.

23 "Talking to People in South Armagh, by Captain Robert Nairac," appendix to Toby Harnden, pp. 370–71.

24 "Third Epistle to Timothy," Hay (Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 99. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as Hay. For more on Hay, see my "An Irish Poet in America," Raritan, XVIII (1999), pp. 145–57, and for an account of Gaelic motifs in Muldoon, see my "The Aistriúchán Cloak: Paul Muldoon and the Irish Language," New Hibernia Review, V (2001), pp. 123–34.

25 For more on Anketell Moutray, see Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Faithful Tribe (London: Harper Collins, 2000 [2nd ed.]), p. 37. Edward's (highly partisan) study notes the political use of the Irish language in the Gaelicization of Republican spokesmen's names (for instance, Brendan McKenna/ Breandán MacCionniath), "so as to irritate unionists," although in the case of disgraced Republican Seán MacStiofáin, Edwards observes the tendency by Republicans to "downgrade . . . him back to his original name," John Stephenson (n., p. 364).

26 Muldoon's line may also echo Austin Clarke's resolution to remove "the clapper from the bell of rhyme," a line singled out for mockery by Samuel Beckett in his "Recent Irish Poetry" (in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, London: John Calder, 1983, p. 72).

27 The Irish for No, Gallery Press, 1987, p. 49. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as Irish for No.

28 Neil Corcoran, "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Ciaran Carson's The Irish for No," in Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Bridgend: Seren, 1992), p. 231.

29 Edward Thomas, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 104.

30 Belfast Confetti (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1989), p. 11. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as Belfast Confetti.

31 Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/ Through the Looking Glass (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 218.

32 Carson had previously used this phrase in his first collection, The New Estate and Other Poems (Gallery, 1988 [1st ed., 1976]), p. 32.

33 Cf. the mirror imagery in "Loaf," also from Belfast Confetti.

34 Cf. "Campaign" for a similar treatment of identity as something determined externally and through violence: the question "Who exactly was he?" is answered after torture by the interrogated man being "told . . . [w]hat he was" and "shot . . . nine times" (Irish for No, p. 36).

35 Ian Duhig's poem "From the Irish" from The Bradford Count offers a further example of the same joke (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991, p. 9).

36 Constitutionally Irish remains the first language of the Irish Republic.

37 Goodby, p. 295.

38 First Language (Gallery Press, 1993), pp. 12, 13, 16.

39 Opera et Cetera (Gallery Press, 1996), p. 11. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as Opera et Cetera.

40 Compare "Opus 14": "Spokesman for censored political party spoke in someone else's lip-synch/ So perfectly, you'd think it was the man himself, though much of this is double-think" (First Language, p. 31).

41 Carson had glanced at the same theme in "Opus Operandi" ("the shibboleths of aitch and haitch," First Language, p. 60).

42 Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," in Edward Mendelson, ed., The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 242.

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