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Mark Ford

  • The Irish for No by Ciaran Carson
    Bloodaxe, 63 pp, £4.95, July 1988, ISBN 1 85224 075 X
  • On Ballycastle Beach by Medbh McGuckian
    Oxford, 59 pp, £4.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 19 282106 7
  • Themes on a Variation by Edwin Morgan
    Carcanet, 166 pp, £6.95, May 1988, ISBN 0 85635 778 2
  • Metro by George Szirtes
    Oxford, 68 pp, £4.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 19 282096 6
  • April Galleons by John Ashbery
    Carcanet, 97 pp, £8.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 85635 776 6

This is Ciaran Carson’s second collection of poems. His first, The New Estate (1976), revealed an intricate, lyrical poet intensely aware of traditional Irish cultures, and concerned to connect them meaningfully with the sprawl of modern living; these early poems are taut, rather literary, and often very beautiful. His themes are pretty much the same in his equally impressive new book, but his approach to them has changed radically. All the poems in The Irish for No are written in long easygoing lines – more or less fourteeners – and exhibit a wonderful fidelity to the casual flow of ordinary speech and storytelling. What could be more enticing and relaxing than this for the opening of a yarn?

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