Still Life
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In Still Life, Ciaran Carson guides us through centuries of art and around the Belfast Waterworks where he walks with his wife, Deirdre; into the chemo ward; into memory and the allusive quicksilver of his mind, always bidding us to look carefully at the details of a painter's canvas, as well as the sunlight of day. This master translator chooses here to translate the painter's brush with the poet's pen, finding resemblances, echoes, and parallels. A thorn becomes the nib of a writer's pencil and the pointed pipette of a chemo drip entering the poet's vein. Yet, Deirdre stands as much in the center of these poems as do the paintings. At times, the two seem to escape into the paintings themselves: "Standing by the high farmstead in the upper left of the picture—there!—in a patch of / sunlight. … They could be us, out for a walk." Balancing the desire to escape into the stillness and permanence of art with the insistent yearning to be fully present in each moment, Carson reminds us—"Look! … There!"—that in the midst of illness, even in the face of death, there is, still, life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The visually rich and contemplative posthumous collection from Carson, who died in October, draws from memory and ekphrasis, bringing to life works by Cezanne, Poussin, and Caillebotte, among others. Aware of his impending mortality, Carson uses memory to savor the present beauty of life on Earth. In "Claude Monet, Artist's Garden at V theuil, 1880," he considers a pot of daffodils upended by a vandal, reflecting on the endless names of colors and various names for flowers themselves, the "many/ shades of meaning" bestowed to language. The poem concludes: "It's beautiful weather, the 30th of March, and tomorrow the/ clocks go forward./ How strange it is to be lying here listening to whatever it is/ is going on./ The days are getting longer now, however many of them I/ have left./ And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily/ outlast their end." In "Basil Blackshaw, Windows I-V, 2001," the poet asks his wife "for the umpteenth time/ What you think about when you think of Blackshaw's Windows,/ when I spy you/ Through the bay window tending to something in our/ minuscule front garden." Celebrated paintings here serve as personal monuments. This beautiful collection offers a lasting, life-affirming tribute to human relationships, memory, and the shared experience of art.
