“between that world and this”: A Reading of Breaking News by Ciaran Carson

Abstract

Ciaran Carson, in the forty poems that constitute Breaking News – published in 2003 –, has used extraneous documents, i.e. the narration by an Anglo-Irish journalist of some of the best-known 19-th century military campaigns, but also the paintings by Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault, Edward Hopper, or still the poetry of William Carlos Williams. This paper aims at showing how Carson’s poetry is given wider scope and deeper resonance through this uncommonly diverse historical, literary and cultural context. The uncanny coexists with reality or gets substituted for it and poetry becomes the ultimate recourse against the unnameable.

Keywords

• Poetry
• Painting
• Wars
• Intertextuality
• Verse