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Overview
"Shortly after a man and a woman meet for the first time in a second-hand clothes shop in Belfast, a bomb goes off. It is some time in the 1970s. They become lovers. For All We Know is their story, told in the recent past: a meditation on love, place, memory, loss and language, how people know each other, misunderstand each other, or translate each other, not to mention the events and circumstances which are beyond their control." Gesturing towards a conventional sonnet sequence - the poems consist of fourteen lines, or multiples thereof, in lines of fourteen syllables - Ciaran Carson's novelistic book also references film noir, Cold War thriller, fairy story, and the art of the fugue. In its uncanny music, repercussions and reprises, its mysterious unfolding of what happened or what might have been in Paris and Dresden (or was it Berlin?), For All We Know is a sequence of poems like nothing you've ever read before.Synopsis
"Shortly after a man and a woman meet for the first time in a second-hand clothes shop in Belfast, a bomb goes off. It is some time in the 1970s. They become lovers. For All We Know is their story, told in the recent past: a meditation on love, place, memory, loss and language, how people know each other, misunderstand each other, or translate each other, not to mention the events and circumstances which are beyond their control." Gesturing towards a conventional sonnet sequence - the poems consist of fourteen lines, or multiples thereof, in lines of fourteen syllables - Ciaran Carson's novelistic book also references film noir, Cold War thriller, fairy story, and the art of the fugue. In its uncanny music, repercussions and reprises, its mysterious unfolding of what happened or what might have been in Paris and Dresden (or was it Berlin?), For All We Know is a sequence of poems like nothing you've ever read before.
Fred Muratori - Library Journal
In a parallel series of poems bearing matched titles, this latest collection by the Irish poet (after Breaking News in 2003) takes on a fugal structure, its components developing, as Carson writes in "Je Reviens"-"separately/ but simultaneously on two distinct levels, wavelengths/ of suggestion and risk as well as definite statement." Framed as recollections of intimate conversations between lovers, often over candlelight dinners in hotel restaurants, the poems subvert their quiet surfaces with fleeting evocations of political unrest: the 1968 Paris demonstrations, the firebombing of Dresden, the Irish troubles. The past is chimerical, a shifting blend of memory and dream, and Carson's recycling of images and vocabulary throughout creates a sense of suspension rather than suspense, of a narrative never fully realized, signaling that language is too unstable a medium for the preservation of truth and that one's life can be conjured as much as experienced ("We were brought up to lead double lives"). Carson's experiment in poetic déjà vu may puzzle some readers and feel static to others, but it offers subtexts aplenty for those willing to follow its enigmatic, circular paths. Recommended for large collections.
Editorials
Library Journal
In a parallel series of poems bearing matched titles, this latest collection by the Irish poet (after Breaking News in 2003) takes on a fugal structure, its components developing, as Carson writes in "Je Reviens"-"separately/ but simultaneously on two distinct levels, wavelengths/ of suggestion and risk as well as definite statement." Framed as recollections of intimate conversations between lovers, often over candlelight dinners in hotel restaurants, the poems subvert their quiet surfaces with fleeting evocations of political unrest: the 1968 Paris demonstrations, the firebombing of Dresden, the Irish troubles. The past is chimerical, a shifting blend of memory and dream, and Carson's recycling of images and vocabulary throughout creates a sense of suspension rather than suspense, of a narrative never fully realized, signaling that language is too unstable a medium for the preservation of truth and that one's life can be conjured as much as experienced ("We were brought up to lead double lives"). Carson's experiment in poetic déjà vu may puzzle some readers and feel static to others, but it offers subtexts aplenty for those willing to follow its enigmatic, circular paths. Recommended for large collections.
—Fred Muratori