Read together, these two epigraphs sound several keynotes for this essay. In the first, Rebecca Solnit remarks on the way in which a particular practice of space – walking – constitutes a means by which to bring together and establish dialogues between the representational (mapped) and experiential (lived) registers of a place. In this way, the maze is ‘made sense of’ – what was confusing becomes clear. Walking offers resolution. The second statement, given by Carson in interview with Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, might be read in a similar vein. Here, ‘exploring’ – an activity that, for Carson, would most often take place on foot – plays a comparable role, offering reconciliation if not resolution. However, Carson's terminology and phrasing is characteristically ambiguous, even paradoxical: to find the way out of the labyrinth is also to move deeper into it. If, for Solnit, the maze-like qualities of urban space are to be overcome, then, for Carson, they are also to be embraced. Carson's purpose has often been to recognise the complicated interaction of the various perspectives on place that are inscribed in variant modes – walking the streets, reading maps, reading poems – of experiencing and representing urban landscape.

If Northern Irish politics and history have played a large part in conditioning critical readings of the province's poetry, Carson scholarship has increasingly tended to read him primarily as a poet of place, of the city and specifically of Belfast, rather than as a poet of the Troubles (though, of course, the two arenas are intimately related). The contents page of Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays, edited by Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, makes clear the extent to which Carson's texts speak to literary geographical interests. Neal Alexander's recent monograph Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing emphasises a similar set of concerns. Furthermore, wide-ranging studies of the relationship between poetry and place have engaged with Carson's work: Peter Barry, in Contemporary British Poetry and the City, emphasises the extent to which his poetry is ‘relentlessly loco-specific’…