Ciaran Carson is one of Ulster's finest and most forceful poets, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1993 for First Language. That collection saw the first airing of a new narrative technique used throughout Opera Et Cetera: long-lined rhyming couplets echoing Irish ballad metre with its criss-cross assonances. These innovative new poems contemplate the structure and authority of language. The book is framed by two long sequences, one based on the letters of the alphabet, the other on radio operator's code; as distorting mirrors of each other, they continually call into question how we tell each other stories all the time. Two other sequences complete the book: Et Cetera plays with the near-moribund vocabulary of Latin tags, while Alibi consists of versions from Romanian poet Stefan Augustin Doinas. In its juggling with the nuts and bolts of words, in its obsessive musical sweep, Opera Et Cetera is a tour de force. It is also, sometimes, very funny. Poetry Book Society Choice.