Self-contained Images and the Invisible Cities of Tokyo

Abstract

Ciaran Carson visited Tokyo in 1998 on the invitation of IASIL-Japan. They were five ‘action-packed days’ and the city was ‘exhilarating for its foreignness’,¹ but he had already begun to be interested in Japan about a decade earlier, mainly through literature. My analysis will look first of all at his experimentation with the Japanese haiku form, from the early versions in Belfast Confetti (1989) to the ‘self-contained images’ of the long lines in The Twelfth of Never (1998b). I will subsequently consider some of the Japanese themes and motifs in the same collection, showing how the ‘Japanese effect’ in Carson’s poetry does not only refer to style, but to the many unpredictable ways in which Japan has shaped his imagination. Drawing a parallel with the Italian writer Italo Calvino, I will argue that Carson’s Tokyo is another ‘invisible city’, or a multiplicity of ‘invisible cities’. The ‘Japanese’ poems in The Twelfth² share what Italo Calvino called ‘lightness’, a quality which he defined as follows: ‘I tried to find some harmony between the adventurous, the picaresque inner rhythm that prompted me to write and the frantic spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic and sometimes grotesque’ (1996: 4).