This thesis is a study of the formation and development of Ciaran Carson’s poetics from his debut in the 1970s up to and including his fourth principal collection of poems, First Language, published in 1993. Examining Carson’s recourse to different kinds of rewriting, made manifest as intertextuality and translation, it aims to account for the thematic formulation and formal realization of this poetics. The poetics is elicited from two distinct groups of poems. The first group comprises poems, given in the consecutive volumes The Lost Explorer (1978), The Irish for No (1987), Belfast Confetti (1989) and First Language, in which textile techniques serve metaphorically as poetic techniques. These poems are read as formulating a poetics which is formally realized in a second group of poems in which rewriting is the dominant technique. By examining the textile/textual metaphors, and their gradual reconfiguration, and the different manifestations of rewriting in Carson’s work the thesis seeks to describe and demonstrate some of the main principles and expressions of this poetics and its development over time. The thesis sees rewriting as integral to Carson’s poetic method: Earlier texts are deliberately drawn upon and made a constitutive part of a new poem. To account for the textual relations and their effect on meaning-making perspectives are borrowed from theories of intertextuality, especially intertextuality as conceptualized by Gérard Genette and Laurent Jenny, as well as from contemporary translation studies and poetics. A theoretical framework is also provided by the textile/textual metaphors which are employed as analytical tools. It is argued that rewriting is not an end in itself but an important means for the poet to articulate his views on both aesthetic and historical issues. The thesis relates the practice of rewriting to a prominent concern in Carson’s work: the relation between form and material and how to adequately express the complicated experiences associated with Northern Ireland in poetic form. The thesis contends through detailed analysis of Carson’s strategies of rewriting that his persistent recourse to recycling discloses his attentiveness to his own poetic expression and that his poetics should be seen as both an aesthetics and an ethics – an evolving response along both aesthetic and ethical lines to the complexities of his situation and his role as a poet. / Avhandlingen är en studie av den nordirländske poeten Ciaran Carsons poetik, dess framväxt och utveckling till och med Carsons fjärde diktsamling, First Language, som publicerades 1993. Genom en undersökning av Carsons användning av olika slag av omskrivning, manifesterade som intertextualitet och översättning, syftar avhandlingen till att ge en redogörelse för hur Carsons poetik har tematiskt formulerats och formellt realiserats. Carsons poetik friläggs genom ett närstudium av två grupper dikter. Den första gruppen består av dikter från samlingarna The Lost Explorer (1978), The Irish for No (1987), Belfast Confetti (1989) och First Language, där textila tekniker tjänar som metaforer för poetiska tekniker. Dessa dikter läses som formuleringar av en poetik som förverkligas i en andra grupp dikter där omskrivning är den huvudsakliga tekniken. Genom att undersöka dikternas textila/textuella metaforer och deras gradvisa omvandling samt olika manifestationer av omskrivning i Carsons verk, söker avhandlingen beskriva och demonstrera några av de huvudsakliga principerna i Carsons poetik, liksom de uttryck dessa tar sig, samt hur dessa principer och uttryck förändras över tid. Avhandlingen ser omskrivning som en väsentlig del av Carsons poetiska metod. Tidigare texter får tjäna som underlag för en ny dikt. När det gäller textuella relationer och deras betydelseskapande kraft stöder jag mig på teorier om intertextualitet, främst Gérard Genettes och Laurent Jennys, liksom på perspektiv hämtade från samtida översättningsteori och poetik. Teoretiska perspektiv ges också av de textila/textuella metaforer som används som analytiska redskap. Omskrivning är dock inte ett mål i sig för Carson, utan ett viktigt sätt för poeten att artikulera sin syn på både estetiska och historiska frågor. I avhandlingen relateras omskrivningens praktik till något som upptagit Carson i hela hans författarskap: förhållandet mellan form och material och hur de komplexa nordirländska erfarenheterna ska kunna ges ett adekvat poetiskt uttryck. Utifrån en detaljerad analys av Carsons omskrivningsstrategier hävdas att hans genomgående bruk av återanvändning återspeglar en höggradig medvetenhet om det egna poetiska uttrycket. Hans poetik ska ses som både en estetik och en etik – ett sätt att fortlöpande återknyta, längs både estetiska och etiska linjer, till den komplexa situation han befinner sig i och till hans roll som poet.

This thesis intervenes in current critical debates about space, place and landscape in late-twentieth and twenty-first century British and Irish poetry, by examining models of excavation in selected work by Geoffrey Hill, Ciaran Carson, Geraldine Monk and Alice Oswald. It argues that the influence of the spatial turn on literary criticism over the last thirty years has led to the deployment of a limited set of spatial tropes as analytical tools for interpreting the spaces and places of poetry. By deploying excavation as a critical method it seeks to challenge existing approaches that tend to privilege ideas of space over time, and socio-spatial practices over literary traditions of writing place. In doing so it develops a new model for reading contemporary poetries of place that asserts the importance of locating spatial criticism within temporal and literary-historical frameworks. The four poets examined in the thesis exhibit a common concern with unearthing the strata of language as well as material space. Starting from a premise that excavation always works over the ground of language as well as landscape it investigates the literary traditions of landscape writing in which each of these poets might be said to be embedded. After surveying the critical field the thesis sets out four principles of excavation that it argues are transformed and renewed by each of these poets: the relationship between past and present; recovery and interpretation of finds; processes of unearthing; exhumation of the dead. The subsequent chapters contend that these conventions are put into question by Geoffrey Hill’s sedimentary poetics, Ciaran Carson’s parodic stratigraphy, Geraldine Monk’s collaborations with the dead, and Alice Oswald’s geomorphology of a self-excavating earth. The critical method that underpins the discussion in each of the chapters is also excavatory in that it unearths both the historical and literary strata of specific sites (the Midlands, Belfast, East Lancashire, Dartmoor and the Severn estuary) and resonances in the work of earlier poetic excavators (Paul Celan, Edward Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Dante Alighieri and Homer). Through careful exegesis of these poets and their precursors this thesis demonstrates that by transforming existing forms of excavation, contemporary poetry is able to renew its deep dialogue with place and literary history.