I love Ciaran Carson’s work. I have loved it since my junior year of undergrad, when I was studying abroad in Scotland and took a course on contemporary Scottish and Irish literature. We read The Ballad of the HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems, and something in Carson’s depictions of his beloved, troubled city hooked itself deep inside me. I have never forgotten the closing lines of his poem “Smithfield Market”: Since everything went up in smoke, no entrances, no exits. But as the charred […]