{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04409005628517824, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004690431519699813, 'mean_word_length': 5.097142857142857, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Mapping the Trenches: Gyres, Switchbacks and Zig-zag Circles in W. B. Yeats and Ciaran Carson

In the recent long poem ‘The War Correspondent’, Ciaran Carson undertakes a complex geographical tour (through Gallipoli, Varna, Balaklava, Sebastopol ...) which maps the history of the Crimean War, and is also subtly evocative, in its techniques and imagery, of the two world wars [2]. The poem consolidates, in the context of European history and warfare, preoccupations apparent in Carson’s earlier work with the representation and experience of crisis: a delight in telling unof cial histories, the politics of naming, and the always problematic, here wryly undercut expectations of poet as war correspondent. The poem also makes explicit the link between Carson’s mapping of his home ground, particularly in the 1980s, and the history of militarism and imperialism which underpins perceptions of contemporary Belfast. The forerunner of ‘The War Correspondent’ is ‘Belfast Confetti’, with its speaker caught in a war-zone, a ‘hyphenated line, a burst of rapid  re’: