Shamrock Tea Book

In his latest venture into richly eclectic prose fantasy, Ulster poet Ciaran Carson figures that if Shamrock Tea (a herbal remedy which when imbibed cleanses the windows of perception and can aid flying and time travelling) were to infiltrate the waters of a Belfast reservoir, peace would prevail. But the stores of Shamrock Tea have been depleted and the young narrator of Carson's book must drink a brew and travel back to 15th-century Bruges and into the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck to hunt for its source. Reading like Harry Potter for intellectuals, the unusual Shamrock Tea is both mystifying and spectacular by turns. Carson begins fairly typically enough with childhood and a boy remembering the chalky taste of the wallpaper in his bedroom. He then muses, like every poet, on the names in his paint-box: Burnt Sienna, Prussian Blue and Hooker's Green. But where another writer might end up on the streets of Manhattan, Carson traces Vermilion to dead worms and Hooker's Green to two frog-skinned children who appeared at the house of Arnolfini in Bruges and then to the robes worn by the female figure in the van Eyck painting. Each short chapter is named after a colour or pun on a colour--"Dorian Gray"--and is linked to the previous one like beads on a string, sparkling, but separate: All life is a great chain, the nature of which is known when we are shown a single link of it. In many ways Shamrock Tea is about how the sheer elasticity of imaginative verve works, making it astounding, funny and quite mad. Cherry SmythRead More