Ciaran Carson in The Green Room

Taken in The Lexicon for the Mountains to the Sea fest in 2015. 

His early books, The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti, made a big impression on me. Like Paul Muldoon, he is excellent at the shaggy-poem story, the digressions within digressions, the long short cuts. And like the American C.K. Williams, he specialised in the long line, flattening the rhythm to deadpan, a poker-faced storyteller, or interrogator, whose music is in the timing, the juxtapositions and coffin-dark jokes, the tragic and visceral reportage, the delayed rhymes and half rhymes, the keen ear for local accents and turns of phrase. He is a master of the proper noun, especially in his early poems, and (like Muldoon, or Joyce of course) relishes the exact, technically precise word, each of which is deliberate as a product placement: not a razor but Wilkinson Swords, not a loaf, but a McWatters pan loaf, not a street, but Odessa Street or Crimea Street, and the military jargon of Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh, Makrolon face-shields. 

More recently, in his book, The Night Watch, he pruned his lines right back to the bone. You can read a couple of these poems HERE. 

A poem that has stayed with me is one from his 1987 collection, The Irish For No, the short 'Two Winos', which I first read (or remembered) on a poster on the DART, observational and direct as a great photograph, or a stark scene from a newsreel. I can't find a link to it, but here's another of a similar ilk (though several shades darker) from the same collection, Campaign.