ABSTRACT
This chapter compares two statements. First, Rebecca Solnit: 'Walking the streets is what links up reading the map with living one's life, the personal microcosm with the public macrocosm; it makes sense of the maze all around'. Second, Ciaran Carson: 'Perhaps the way out of the labyrinth is to get deeper into it, more fully to explore its ramifications'. For Solnit, the maze-like qualities of urban space are to be overcome, then for Carson, they are also to be embraced. The chapter focuses on historicized accounts of Carson's writing and elucidates the ways in which his poetry of place and his spatial poetics have developed in response to a specific set of circumstances. Building on ideas of 'situated perspective', it shows that Carson's poetry emphasizes the uncertainties of any attempt to register Belfast's places. The chapter considers Carson's employment of a camera metaphor to describe the processes of recording and redrafting that inhere in his representations of Belfast.
