Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Queen's Gambit
This poem has stuck with me more than the others, even though I very much like almost everything in Belfast Confetti. Queen's Gambit implies sacrifice, and the time-wise pace of a game of chess could serve as the metronome for the rhythm of this poem, vacillating between three and four-line stanzas, with short fold-over lines, it reads like a telegram or typewriter with carriage return lever. Tight, musical beat, interesting changes and jazziness, simple description is used efficiently to indelibly present vividness in a floating image heap that's still tethered to solid ground somewhere below. In this phantasmagory, social commentary manages to be proclaimed without putting off, and the language is flourished with the whole spectrum of sounds-- many times within the same line. Subtle comparisons of the soldier as robot, a near obsession with numerological influence or consequence, and the restraint of pauses where the stanza breaks all seem to convey the frustration of living with terrorism-- long periods of boredom and anxiety peppered with sudden horror and tragedy. Carson does well here with giving the reader a sense of action, like with the ink rubbing off and the paper "with so many foldings and unfoldings, whole segments of the / map have fallen off." A sharp, scissor-like cadence of hard-ending words tick-tocks its way around, "the blank screen / jittering / With numerals and flak, till the picture jumps back--a bit out / of sync." The buzzing bees and mounting energy by line 82 takes on an uptempo spirit, and you want to dance a jig. The ending's implied death, and rebirth with love, wraps up a newsworthy and emotionally restored game of chess. The slithering assistant, for one, helps this poem live in a surreal organizational pool of adventure and risk.
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Wow, Andy, that's so smartly discussed -- I really like that section about "the frustration of living with terrorism," especially, and the way you connect this to line lengths, stanza breaks, et al. (which is appropriate, too, given that Carson seems so interested in punctuation (itself a form of "Belfast confetti"), in the "walking" line, in narrative fractures, etc.). You might really be finding a final paper topic in a posting like this (it's possible the narrative pacing of Eureka Street might give you even further ideas in this regard).
ReplyDeleteI'm so fascinated by "Queen's Gambit," too, as I indicated in class. It's fascinating both in terms of its tricky narrative (having to do with a double-cross told, seemingly, from multiple perspectives) and, as you so insightfully note, in terms of its form and style. We've been talking at various times about how dates are so indelibly stamped in the Irish consciousness (and in both the Catholic and Protestant imaginations), so you're right to call attention to "numerological influence" in this poem (especially with all of those "Nines and Sixes"). The narrative and perspectival mutations of this poem may best be captured by the lines: "It's all the go, here, changing something into something else, / like rhyming / Kampuchea with Cambodia." And then the final twist, at the very end: do you read that as suggesting that the narrator/guy who is having his haircut at the barber's is, in fact, Mad Dog?? The possibility at least exists that this is the case, right?
Well, I'm hoping there are a few more of you lurking out there, reading these words, and perhaps willing to leave a bit of a trail: a poem or a moment in Belfast Confetti that you liked or found especially interesting or provocative ...