Rescaled Temporalitites in Stephen Sexton's Elegy for Ciaran Carson

Stephen Sexton’s second volume Cheryl’s Destinies (2021) continues a juxtaposition of moods, modalities and temporalities he began in If All the World and Love Were Young. To set forth Sexton as an invigorating ‘new voice’ of Irish letters, this contribution explores his revival of the genre of the elegy by examining his 166-lined elegy ‘So it is,’, written during the pandemic in memoriam for his teacher Ciaran Carson, who died of lung cancer on 6 October 2019. By focusing on this specific hand-off of a poetic baton from one generation to the next, we may appreciate Sexton’s textual inheritances and the importance of intergenerational relationships in Northern Irish poetry. Works from Carson’s diverse literary canon frequently appear, sometimes obliquely, in Sexton’s long poem, becoming a ghostly and unpredictable presence therein. In shadowing his mentor, Sexton comes to regard the experience of living in Northern Ireland as one in which all encounters and events are doubled; such temporal and textual repetitions provide Sexton’s readers with instances of equilibrium, even if of a short-lived and liminal variant. Herein, the pandemic becomes a tangible reminder of embodied entanglements, like the dangerous air that necessitates a poet’s (and a reader’s) shift in tempo (time) and scale (space). Sexton achieves his far-reaching sense of dynamic motion, despite a context of global mourning, by harnessing the dual energies of Mercury and Apollo, thereby mirroring the diverse qualities of his elegised subject. What emerges is a trajectory capable of stepping across time, across fatal illness and across Belfast’s shifting urban space. Ultimately, Sexton’s spatio-temporal poetics of balance allow him to align the ‘realms’ of past and present, dead and alive, sluggish and accelerated and enclosed and expansive to better navigate the doglegged journey that is Carson’s signature, and becomes Sexton’s chosen form of homage.