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Sounding the city: Ciaran Carson and the perceptual politics of war

‘Only the city’, argues Ciaran Carson, ‘can be a map of the city’. Carson, writing of a ‘Troubled’ Belfast, suggests that the immanence of violence in a conflict zone leaves landmarks contingent, potentially temporary, alarmingly open to being ‘swallowed in the maw of time’. This uncertainty collapses optic (and the map's pan-optic) logic: less a legible landscape than a ‘demolition city’, Belfast seems a shape-shifter of sorts, an urban palimpsest where past haunts present and ‘streets and shops [are the stuff of] memory’. Carson's poetry responds to this injunction, plotting Belfast's ‘dangerous potentiality’ by tracing the epistemological exhaustion of the visual. It also, however, provisionally re-maps the city in and through sound, considering place in acoustic space. While Carson's poem ‘Question Time’ peremptorily pronounces that ‘[m]aps and street directories are suspect’, his ‘Queen's Gambit’ charts Belfast's whirrings, tickings, hissings, and rumblings in their stead. Carson therefore offers a ‘semiotics of sound’ with which locals navigate the otherwise slippery city. The tin can, for instance, that rolls down Balaclava Street whenever trouble is in the offing, serves as an aural alert – though ‘thousands hear it, no one s[ees] it’ – guiding city travel.