For All We Know by Ciaran Carson, reviewed by Anna Lewis

Throughout Ciaran Carson's latest collection, certain images recur almost obsessively: a tolling bell, a patchwork quilt, an unanswered telephone.  Each time that these images resurface, the reader is reminded of their appearance in previous poems, just as in 'Zungzwang', the final poem,

...the words of the song when remembered each time around
remind us of other occasions at different times.

For All We Know is a remarkable sequence of seventy inter-connected poems, narrated by an Irish man named Gabriel, as he looks back on his relationship with Nina, a French woman whom he met in Belfast in the 1970s.  Although the poems jump back and forwards through time, the full impact of the sequence only comes across when it is read in order.  As each poem adds a little more detail to the couple's story, the reader gradually discovers two young people who are each rather on the edge of the story they share.  Gabriel and Nina spend much time apart, and when they are together, they speak to one another in second languages.  Both characters are used to this dualistic state of affairs, as Nina explains in the second of two poems called 'Treaty':

I grew up between languages, not knowing which came first.
My mother spoke one tongue to me, my father another.

This is an echo of the previous poem, the second called 'On the Contrary':

It's because we were brought up to lead double lives, I said.
Yes, you said, because of the language thing it was one thing

with my father, another with my mother.  Father tongue
and mother tongue, all the more so when they separated

irrevocably.

A sense of separation runs through the collection, emphasised by the division of the book into two parts, with the titles of the poems in Part Two repeating the titles of the poems in Part One, in the same order.  In the constant repetition of images, phrases and titles, the reader encounters Gabriel's preoccupations over and over again.  Gabriel's narration swings between past and present, between dream and reality, between his memories of himself and his memories of Nina, so that he frequently seems to be in two places at once.  Against a backdrop of the conflict in Northern Ireland, the double agent is another recurrent motif.  Comforting Nina after a nightmare, in the first 'Collaboration', Gabriel reflects:

When you wake I hold you tight, saying, It's only a dream,
the language of dream has nothing to do with that of life.

And as eventually you sink back into the deep well
of sleep, I wonder if by my words I have betrayed you.

For All We Know is an intricately constructed collection and, while it is inevitable in a sequence of this length that some of the poems do not stand very strongly on their own (the second 'Zungzwang' functions as a conclusion, reiterating images from previous poems), each of the poems is essential to the overall coherence of the sequence.  Carson's sense of rhythm never falters, carrying each poem easily to the next, and the occasional rhymes are excellent and startling, as at the ending of the first 'L'Air du Temps':

I can see the house where I was raised, and my mother's house.
I am in her boudoir looking at her in the mirror

as she, pouting, not looking, puts on L'Air du Temps, a spurt
of perfume on each wrist before she puts her wristwatch on.

The delicacy and precision with which images are repeated from poem to poem very rarely seems laboured or artificial; every image retains its freshness, and gains significance with each reoccurrence.  Nonetheless, as a collection of poems in which a young couple get to know one another, and form a romantic relationship, the tone of For All We Know is sometimes a little heavy in significance: every word the characters utter is portentous, lacking any innocence or humour.  The characters may have seemed a little warmer if, once in a while, the reader was able to hear them bickering about whose turn it was to do the washing up.  Given the intellectual intensity of the relationship, the portrayal of sex is strangely coy, the only moment of real physical immediacy arriving at the end of the second 'The Anniversary', when Gabriel and Nina buy oysters:

You opened one with a dab twist.  When you gave me the knife
to try my hand slipped and I gashed the knuckle of my thumb.

Before I could protest you put your mouth to the deep cut. 
When you raised your head I kissed my blood on your open lips.

For All We Know is not, however, a sequence about a man falling in love, but about a man remembering falling in love.  In Gabriel's mind, one memory of Nina's patchwork quilt sparks another memory, and another, and as the images and conversations that obsess him build up into layers, each word is required to carry the weight of all the words that went before. 

In the second 'Prelude and Fugue', Nina describes church bells tolling "as if keeping to a score / of harmony and dissonance".  The collection as a whole echoes this balance.  From the compulsions and confusions of Gabriel's memory, from its layers and repetitions, Carson allows a coherent and memorable story to emerge.

Ciaran Carson, For All We Know (Gallery Press, £10.95)

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.