RaveApollo MagazineThe book is structured as a series of responses to paintings – by Old Masters, modern painters and contemporary Irish artists – opening out on to wider reflections. The transformative joy that comes from seeing the world in all its complexity is at the centre of Ciaran’s writing, with those framing windows always there, in the forms his poetry took, its rhythms and textual patterns, as the shapes of that looking and understanding ... The series of ekphrastic poems that make up Still Life, his final book, written knowing it would be his final book, tenderly interweave his life in Belfast with paintings he admired ... We are poorer, so much poorer, for the silencing of Ciaran Carson’s voice.
