The garden cannot be unplanted and Ciaran Carson’s war correspondences: intertextual fusion in Breaking News

Some of the poems move back in time, as I study my family history as it relates to masculinity, violence, American militarism, patriotism and coming of age. These poems consider the role of art in wartime as well as the female body, the male gaze and violence against women. <br><br>The critical component analyses Ciaran Carson’s Forward Prize-winning book, Breaking News.

In the introduction, I ground my study in the theory of intertextuality, the relationship between war reportage and poetry, and Carson’s approaches to translation. I invent the term ‘fused poem’ and apply it to Carson’s use of William Howard Russell’s war reportage. In the first chapter, I explore stylistic fusion in ‘The War Correspondent’ and ‘The Indian Mutiny’, analyzing rhyme and the lyric ‘I’ in order to show the antiphonal relationship between Carson and Russell.