Ocean Vuong The Yale Review

"[Ciaran] Carson’s gorgeous sequence Still Life ranks among his very best work. Written over the course of just a few months following a terminal cancer diagnosis, this characteristically discursive and witty collection reads like an envoi to his wife Deirdre. The lapse of time is marked, symbolically, by the decay of a lemon – “we wanted to see with our own eyes / The end of the life cycle of the lemon” (‘Angela Hackett’) – and the development of a building site near their Belfast home. Frequent mentions of hospital visits and medical treatments in turn augur Carson’s own decline. Yet while the mood is elegiac, the collection is above all a paean to art and life – to the senses, the mind, and love." Chris Cusack The Poetry Review