Last Night's Fun: A Book about Irish Traditional Music

Belfast-born flute player and poet Carson (The Pocket Guide to Irish Music) has four collections of poetry, including First Language, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. Now he applies his poetic prose to mapping the terrain of his Belfast childhood, his early struggles learning music and his travels through Ireland and America, finding friends and fun at a ceili (""an evening visit, a friendly call""), at dances, parties, Sunday soirees and spit-and-sawdust pubs. Each chapter takes the title of a tune, and each tune leads into another: ""Every day, tunes float into my head unbidden; I am caught up in their ingrained patterns. The tune is not a story, but stories cling to it."" For Carson, ""time itself is a chameleon,"" and thousands of stories, literary references, quotes and musical moments resurface. His words express a love of language, of names, musical instruments, cooking, drink and forgotten songs. A spinning LP evokes one tale, and a lost tape recording unreels more memories. A passage on Bob Dylan and Delta bluesmen leads into ""the mythology of trains and the blues,"" then segues into cinematic trains and train wrecks. Here is a book piled with ""unspeakable, archaeological layers of things strewn and assembled,"" all cascading forth in a scintillation of music and life. It is an endless pub crawl in the labyrinthine soul of a remarkable writer who dares to play unfamiliar tunes. (Mar.)