twofold
Edward Carson makes one want to write an essay about the genius of poetry. It would admire his poems’ pursuit of self-discovery, their own identities as fictions. It would remark how they try to grasp the present world (the world of online and AI and digital obfuscation) in all its impresence and pare it down to its metaphoric minimums. But then it would want to insist that, in the end, all of twofold is about metaphor, all metaphors being twofold by definition. It would celebrate the challenge of his work—in his method as much as in his subject matter—of holding two thoughts at once, which is both impossible and manifestly achieved in the poem’s own terms. It would note how threads of thought come near without joining, swirl around and away from one another. But the essay would exhaust itself trying to keep up, and in the end the poems would dance circles around it.
— Jeffery Donaldson, author of Missing Link and Granted: Poems of Metaphor
Wonderfully intriguing, echoic and fun. With pared-down pairing and whetted wit, Edward Carson’s twofold tiptoes through the twos, crosses and recrosses that ancient border between mischief and wisdom. An agile bicameral ballet.
— Don McKay, author of Strike/Slip and Lurch
The poems of twofold are constructed on a bedrock of two and three-beat lines and from this simple foundation Carson creates a fantastical architecture of music and metaphor. This edifice is cantilevered so each floor seems to float free from the one below. It is like walking daily past your favorite building and being amazed again by its cornerstone and its crenellations.
— Ross Leckie, author of The Critique of Pure Reason and Gravity’s Plumb Line
twofold imagines all the possibilities of between, from arithmetic ratio to the electric pulse of love throbbing one towards the other across fields of attraction and resistance. These poems build irresistible momentum through the narrow channels of their minimalist chains of words—they are infinitesimal particle accelerators where thought blinks in and out of valences like particles deciding to be waves, waves longing for particulate being. As Edward Carson seems to know so well, we wear ourself out trying to draw near, fold and refold the pleats of our hearts, ultimately yielding to the “undertow / of binary.”
— Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain
movingparts
Edward Carson’s movingparts engages the primordial subject of deception and truth, “mapping it onto” appearance and reality, so that the either/or can also appear as both/and. For reality appears in appearance, as Carson progressively realizes – makes real – in three suites of poems that nervously explore the ambiguities of language and the unwarranted arrogance of intellect, only to arrive at the healing awareness that the word is at bottom “a body // of tectonic / mingle”. There we can “see more where nothing seems to be / each poem setting free all that is missing”. In one of the volume’s finest poems, set at its centre, entitled – after James Joyce – the bit of seedcake out of my mouth, Carson finds that the true word, in the poem and elsewhere, is “a sub rosa / of paradise // snared from a wider silence.” The truthful words have “escaped free as a bird” from the “lolling addiction to hoodwink” in the deserts of theory and politics, And even in that desert itself there are words with substance and more-than-substance, words ready to be “startled into / life like / detonations of thought”, such that we can again “begin to / realize what / is happening”.
— A. F. Moritz
I have a weakness for beast fable, so the first part of movingparts, cunningly engaged with Aesop’s The Fox and the Crow, was a delight to me. Removing the moral, while keeping the story both ethically and existentially charged in a brisk series of prose poems brings this ancient material newly to life. Staying Greek, the latter two parts are engaged with the literary monument that is Sappho, and what she has meant, in particular, to English translators, especially Anne Carson, rather a monument herself. Sappho’s notorious aporia provides Edward Carson with room to speculate both on how difficult it is to translate desire into language, and further, how the act of translation dually reifies and destabilizes a famous poet’s work. His poems warily circle literary monoliths, and from time to time blow right through them, suddenly rendering their substance into breath.
— Sarah Tolmie, author of The Art of Dying, Trio and Check
Read each poem here aloud, they are riffs on myth and fable, they are koans, they are parables. Edward Carson’s poems in movingparts move between what is or has been already said and what lies under the surface to be spoken. These poems are feminist. They are playful. His fox and crow poems, based on Aesop’s fable, are jazzy riffs on wonder. The tight boxes of one section fall away to short lines and then to long lined couplets, no punctuation so language is fluid as instinct and gesture.
— Yvonne Blomer, author of The Last Show on Earth
Edward Carson’s movingparts weaves in and out of conceptual and material realms, deftly combining crow talk, particle physics, philosophy and erotica, in the restless search for hints and foreshadowing of paradise. Can we imagine it? Can we get there? This poet wagers his soul on the hope and wonder of it, however far off, however thinly glimpsed. A satisfying tour guide through the conceptual and experiential mazes of the contemporary moment.
— Di Brandt, author of The Sweetest Dance on Earth: New and Selected Poems
In movingparts, Edward Carson has created a rare thing: a book of poetry with dramatic sensibility! His poems each form individual parts of a literally moving narrative that stylistically drift within themselves via parataxis. When the poems eventually meditate upon their own mimesis while still extending the narrative and maintaining dramatic tension, one realizes that this is a special book.
— Shane Neilson, author of You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations
whereabouts
“Visible-invisible, inward-made, outward-sensed, these are the markers of Edward Carson’s masterful whereabouts. Over three sections that function like the movements of a symphonic composition, Carson maps out places made of body, made of mind, their mechanisms perfectly rendered through an economical and elegant diction. Building with perfectly calibrated resonances and imagery over its two first parts, whereabouts culminates in a gorgeous celebration of Eros, both suggested and explicit.”
— Beatriz Hausner, author of Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
“In whereabouts, Edward Carson’s remarkable poems form a network of synaptic connections that put a mind into question and reveal a mind in the act of questioning. In these poetic maps and countermaps, thinking is unmoored from conventional thought and reimagined as an “atlas of emotions,” as “a weather of its own making.” These are poems to get lost and found in.”
– Adam Dickinson, author of Anatomic
“whereabouts is a fiercely intelligent, brilliantly beautiful book. Using the sonnet as muse, Edward Carson creates a journey and landscape of language unencumbered by convention. Cartography merges into neurology, revealing patterns of beauty and calculation – a poetic corpus callosum – connecting the intellectual to the emotional, the analytical to the erotic. Carson has in whereabouts created a collection to be not so much read, as experienced.”
– Andrea Thompson, author of A Selected History of Soul Speak and Over Our Heads
“Activated by synaptic metaphor, Edward Carson’s whereabouts is love poetry by way of neuroimaging. Embracing the “harmonics of the brain,” the poet breaks down the world sense-by-sense, delivering a fever dream that is part map, part destination. whereabouts is a welcome addition to the significant tradition of science poetry.”
– Jim Johnstone, editor of The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry
“Edward Carson articulates what can only be characterized as a meticulous neuro-poetics. Simultaneously cerebral and carnal—on occasion even bawdy—these poems map what we moment by moment experience in a machine code of thoughts and feelings that the mind makes of the flesh. No organ is sexier than the brain, and Carson affirms intimacies deeper than zeros and ones. whereabouts may get your baud rate up, but don’t lose track. In this electrochemical romance, Carson has flowcharted a schematic for the praxis toward which lovers aspire and kiss after kiss attain.”
– John Barton, author of Lost Family: A Memoir
“Here are poems that locate and connect as they map an exploratory route through the brain and the heart. Linguistically rich, exacting and sophisticated, they illustrate the underlying principle of interconnectedness—the closeness and the gap. Edward Carson’s whereabouts is a pattern-seeking network of elements that hum and buzz the dialectic, that map as they make.”
– Catherine Graham, author of The Celery Forest and Aether: An Out-of-Body Lyric
Look Here Look Away Look Again
“The poems in Edward Carson’s stunningly original collection explore the intricate patterns of communication and response that unfold when we look at paintings, respond to music, read poems . . . Readers of Look Here Look Away Look Again will be looking in delight, again and again.”
– John Reibetanz, award-winning poet, author of By Hand
“Look Here Look Away Look Again is marvellous. Deep philosophical insights and a delightful set of forms of language that perhaps were indeed the unarticulated thoughts of Einstein or Monet or Mrio, or other geniuses of the past, travelling long space-time distances, like light itself, before they reveal themselves to us on the page.”
– Madhur Anand, author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes
“What a perceiving and perceptive exploration Carson’s new book is . . . [His] investigative, propositional imagination plays on the deviations and paradoxes of representation as it moves towards and away from what we often think of as the real or the hallucinated . . . This is ‘light out of / thin air.’”
– Brian Henderson, author of Nerve Language, [OR], and Unidentified Poetic Object
“Look Here Look Away Look Again is a marvel. Not halfway through the opening poem, I became conscious of a change: I could feel myself – almost see myself – thinking . . . Here was the abstract made immediate, the synaptic insistence of body, brain, and heart.”
– Alissa York, author of The Naturalist
In the deeply engrossing, radiantly-lit Look Here Look Away Look Again – it is not unreasonable to view the entire collection as a series of carefully measured love poems – surprises occur frequently, all but casually, and are, as frequently, revelatory . . . This is masterful, involving, celebratory work.
– Leon Rooke, author of The House on Major Street
The poems of Look Here Look Away Look Again emerge from the desire to see, as painters do, the lines that connect feeling and reason to the universal. Carson’s language is spatial, yet pinned to key images around which abstracted nature flows. I felt, when reading, as if I were eavesdropping on an ecstatic dialogue with eroticism and its chemical and alchemical relationships or, as the poems also indicate, tracking the flight of a birdalong neural pathways as it migrates towards an innermost truth.
– Marilyn Bowering, author of Soul Mouth
Look Here Look Away Look Again is above all thought-provoking and absorbing . . Throughout this volume, language, and mind, and art, and the senses connect in a challenging way.
– Douglas Gibson, author of Across Canada By Story: A Coast-to-Coast Literary Adventure.
“I’m struck by the beautiful impulse Look Here Look Away Look Again encapsulates: its attention to thought in action, to what we see and think and think we see, to how time changes what we see, to how thoughts and impressions and ideas are formed in and out of time. Above all else, Carson draws attention to the search for unity in dispersion and the search for chaos within order as the heartbeat of art itself.”
– David Swartz, PRISM International, PRISM Online, “A Review of Edward Carson’s ‘Look Here Look Away Look Again,’ March 20, 2020.
Look Here Look Away Look Again . . . is experiential and deeply satisfying. The collection delves into paintings by Monet, Giacometti, Pollock, Modigliani, and others . . . Particularly masterful, “Constellations” is a sonnet sequence inspired by Joan Miró’s series of twenty-three small paintings that the Catalan artist began after escaping from Paris a month before the outbreak of the Second World War. Each of the twenty-three sonnets presents a new way of looking, in which form is present without being visible or intrusive. Consider “Morning Star,” in which the poet reminds us that this might “not be a story about morning at all nor is / it really a star but a planet at the tail end / of night.” Because, in the end: “nothing is more important than the truth of / what goes into what is behind what you see.”
– Cora Siré, “Poetry,” Montreal Review of Books, Summer 2019 Issue.
Knots
“This is a philosophical and quizzical look into digressions. Both question and answer, KNOTS is a text concerned primarily with paradoxes, riddles, and dualities. Carson is invested in the self, strategic thought patterns, love’s evolution, and the rationalities of reason. He writes through love’s surfacing, its unconscious answer, “wider than / the water answering itself.”
– Shannon Webb-Campbell, “Poetry,” Montreal Review of Books, Fall 2016, p. 17
Birds Flock Fish School
In Edward Carson’s Birds Flock Fish School, what’s incandescent in his old-school pull toward what might actually be important (“the speech of noise and night”) is the joy in soaring over and the cheat of slipping through. These uncommonly direct, deviously wrought poemsshow scant care for poetic fashion and no fear in addressing, head-on, what we all like to pretend isn’t the quandary: “We’re not at all sure, before/ knowing them, what we see is real,/ what we see emerging and disappearing before us,/soon vanishes for good…” That’s gorgeous, as is so much else here.
– Kevin Connolly, author of Revolver
Birds Flock Fish School gathers and carries us along in a swim of poems. With insight and grace, Edward Carson’s new collection unfolds the possibilities within each of us: “inside of you / another life.” A book of migrations, in which poems open, close, rise and fall, it reveals the simplest, yet most difficult of human undertakings—“how to arrive and when to depart.”
– Anne Simpson, author of IS
“Birds Flock Fish School is preoccupied with the invisible energy that leads birds to flock and fish to school. Throughout the volume, Carson considers the ways in which this energy might be, or is, imitated in the human world. “We long to give ourselves over to its might / to find in its flow something to find ourselves,” the speaker remarks in “Undercurrents.” We also “long,” I think, to “give ourselves over” to the clean, lyrical rhythms of Carson’s poems. Almost all composed of six couplets each, they are loosely ghazal-like: and indeed, in their insistent pursuit of illumination in the realms of “fish” and “birds,” they find an obvious Canadian literary precedent in Phyllis Webb’s 1984 volume of (anti) ghazals, Water and Light. Carson’s limber movement from image to image, couplet to couplet, emulates the mind in action: these poems think vigorously, on behalf of the entire human community. The impersonal grandeur of the collective “we” assumed by the poems leads to sweeping statements and occasionally lends an awkward vagueness to the otherwise precise poetry, but what that “we” sees always dazzles—like snow falling in the morning light, “an intelligent patience filling the air.”
– Laura Cameron, “Canadian Literature, #222, Autumn 2014”
In Birds Flock Fish School, Edward Carson’s meditation on the coming into being and vanishing from existence of life-forms is full of questions: what can be learned from the fluidity of nature, it’s patterns of accumulated wisdom and its intuitive knowledge? A firm sense of the interplay of human and non-human forms underlines the examination of these puzzles: and there’s always a sense of wonder ready to bloom into ecstasy or resolve to contentment, the poems holding out, not just the possibility but the inevitability of a transformation where the secrets withheld from human awareness will unfold. The allusion to Heraclitus in the epigraph is apt: the elements of creation are simple: their multiplicity unfathomable.
– Marilyn Bowering, author of Soul Mouth
These rhetorically intricate, sculpted poems are torqued by a careful energy; their measured turnings and sudden twists, while speculating on the impossibility of knowing the always unfinished real and the fragility of our constructs of time scatter “brilliant mosaics of now” and assert what eludes. This is a fine apophatic poetry that “takes us into currents of colliding waters”.
– Brian Henderson, author of Sharawadji and Nerve Language
Taking Shape
Edward Carson’s linked poems praise at once the logic of love and the place of love. Taking Shape combines his elegance of style and imagination (think of a musical composition) with the immediacy of the erotic. A rare performance.
– Robert Kroetsch, author of The Hornbooks of Rita K
Ed Carson’s Taking Shape is a gem. In this new book of interconnected poems, in an attempt to name what love is, to give it a shape that can be grasped, like a metaphysical lapidarist he facets and re-facets it’s language so that the light it reveals refracts and reflects within it and “exceeds its reason for being”. “We come away believing in the shape of something with no shape at all.”
– Brian Henderson, author of Nerve Language
Ed Carson’s linked poems, Taking Shape, rising and falling in easy cadences, examine how things take shape in the world. Yet for all their fluidity, these poems have a blade-sharp edge. Showing us “held together in a fierce ring of light,” they reveal, poignantly, what it is that makes us human.
– Anne Simpson, author of Loop and Quick
Love, the argument goes, is not a force that can be contained: Ed Carson’s poems in Taking Place don’t attempt to bind the un-bindable — they approximate love’s flavour, turning outward to the other and inward to the self, and also wandering among love’s mysteries, This meditation on love over time rewards re-reading: the reach for the divine is threaded through with human failings:these strike me as not only graceful, but truthful poems.
– Marilyn Bowering, author of Green and What It Takes To Be Human
Edward Carson’s Taking Shape is a feast of immanent thinking. It shows that time-worn tools can indeed, when used with patience, sensitivity, rigour, and devotion, yield pleasures rare and contemporary.
– Mark Truscott, author of Said Like Reeds or Things
Edward Carson’s Taking Shape is a subtle meditation on love and change, lovers caught up in the changes and rhythms of life on this mortal earth. The elegant couplets repeat phrases, words, and images to hypnotic effect. In a manner reminiscent of E.D. Blodgett’s Apostrophes–yet entirely its own–Taking Shape in its play on repetition and variation traces “the faint / shape of things taking shape,” evoking the weather of love.
– Hilary Clark, author of The Dwelling of Weather
Within Ed Carson’s grave meditation on love we can hear sounding the ghost of our old, stately, inexhaustible pentameter. As his measured words resonate and rhyme, accumulating weight, so do his ideas. This is mature poetry that appeals toboth the heart and the head—accomplished, thoughtful, and moving.
– Keith Maillard, author of Gloria
With evocative imagery and the keen eye of a photographer, Carson gives shape to a language of the heart.
– Christopher Dewdney, author of Signal Fires and Acquainted with the Night
Like ocean tides these words pull and push our logic, hearts and spirit into a communion of evolving spaciousness. Taking Shape is powerful and provocative.
– Lucinda M. Vardey, co-author of Being Generous
A collection of poems about love and how it touches all aspects of our lives. Never flinching from truth, Edward Carson demonstrates all the brutal honesties and shapes of his subject. Love, too, comes in a multitude of shapes which we learn to sometimes embrace, and sometimes repel.
– goodreads