On the Night Watch

Few books of poems in our time have been as well received as Ciaran Carson's For All We Know, its haunting power acknowledged by a host of welcoming readers and judges. Now, just one year on (and following the publication also of Collected Poems), this ever protean writer weaves a slower, subtler spell with a profusion of spare, sinuous, riddling shards of memory and insight. In three interlinked movements On the Night Watch fathoms the depths of a well and a mine to discover what can and cannot be said. Exploring the very grammar of English, it remains alert to all that stays unspoken. Exposed to the anxieties of circumstance - a 'siege of sickness' - the poems trace the storms and calms of waiting, not knowing, from fear to the reprieve from fears, and find in the small hours the chink of birdsong and chinks of light. As 'the falling leaves / fall on / the fallen leaves // the rain beats / on the rain' these poems accumulate in a work of characteristically brave adventure.


Genre: Fantasy