The Belfast Review Team | 5 March 2024
Welcome to Week 3 of our Spring Blog. Each week we will feature a handful of new creative works by artists, photographers, writers, poets, and song writers. Different days of the week highlight different creative forms: Feast Your Eyes Sundays (art, photography), Wordy Tuesday (fiction, flash, nonfiction), and Rhythm-Verse Thursday (poetry, song lyrics).
This week we're exploring the theme of 'Inspiration.' As in, the spark that takes our creativity in a new direction, opens up a new way of looking at the world, gives us the permission we need to bring something new into being.
In other words – it's what lights your fire.
Featured academic: Sarah d'Episcopo
We met this academic by chance at the Ciaran Carson conference last autumn hosted by the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University. For anyone who wasn't able to attend, it took place over a few days and featured poets, writers, and academics from around the world reading and discussing the works of the great poet. There was always something new to learn and someone new to meet.
It was lovely to meet Sarah and fascinating to discover that the topic of her PhD is 'the art of love' as depicted in Ciaran Carson's poetic works. As huge fans of Carson, naturally we had to ask if she wished to provide a sneak peek we could share with our readers.
Here is a brief but tantalising glimpse into her research:
Ciaran Carson: The Art of Love
SARAH D'EPISCOPO
Belfast native Ciaran Carson's posthumously published Still Life (2019) is a brilliant exploration of memory and personal experience. It takes readers on a journey of poetic introspection by inviting us to contemplate the complexities of life and universal themes that connect us all. Among these, I find that one shines particularly brilliantly in this volume: love.
The literature of love is manifold, but Carson is especially interested in its meditative, dialogical, and experiential aspects. Throughout Still Life, Carson reveals the profound influence of love on his poetic process. From the tender and near philosophical conversations between Carson and his wife Deirdre, to his own impression of the changing spring-time environment and the implication of a continuous life cycle, Still Life demonstrates Carson's ability to capture the complexities associated with interpersonal connections, where love is part of the lived experience rather than idealised aesthetics.
What Still Life offers is for us to go back - in the Carsonian manner - and pay attention to the emergence of love as both poetic inspiration and poetics in Carson’s oeuvre. In doing so, we find it accompanied by depictions of shared understanding, curiosity, and inspiration: pleasure is drawn from contemplating beloved works of art together and the smallest details lead to new discoveries, as the “Lemon Experiment” reveals. When Carson is administered IV and cannot take notes of his sudden inspiration, he describes Deirdre taking up the pen on his behalf as she becomes part of his poetic undertaking.
Carson’s loving subject thus opens itself up to establishing a relationship with the world. His writing portrays love as characterised by familiarity, understanding, and shared experience. Those same patterns and motifs develop into a newfound experience of subjective and poetic re-creation. Still Life concludes with “James Allen, The House with the Palm Trees, c. 1979*. Ending with Carson’s memories of the flat he used to live in, he writes:
How I loved that old dilapidated flat! And I its denizen at ease below
the peeling ceiling rose,
...
And I loved the buzz of the one-bar electric heater as a bus or a
truck passed by,
And I loved the big windows and whatever I could see through them,
be it cloudy or clear,
And the way they trembled and thrilled to the sound of the world
beyond.
ARTIST BIO
Sarah d’Episcopo is a PhD student at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She holds a BA and MA in English literature and linguistics, with a minor in cultural studies. Her research focuses on Northern Irish writer Ciaran Carson, whose post-Troubles poetry and translations she studies with regards to a poetics of in-betweenness. She is particularly interested in deconstruction and popular culture, intertextuality, and phenomenology.
Special thanks to the author for trusting us with her work.
Thanks to all of you readers for reading! Be sure to like, follow, and share.
Check out our other posts this week:
Feast Your Eyes Sunday (3 Mar) with Art by Nina Staack
Rhythm-Verse Thursday (7 Mar) with Poetry by PS Conway and Shannon Carlin.
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