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Recent criticism of Ciaran Carson’s work tends to emphasize the cultural, geopolitical and historical determinants of his “poetry of place.” Models such as the aisling (or vision poem) or the dinnseanchas (the lore of place) have thus been adduced as evidence of its anchorage in a specifically Irish or Northern Irish tradition. Focusing on the issue of autobiography in three successive collections— Belfast Confetti (1989), The Star Factory (1997) and The Pen Friend (2009)—this essay purports instead to situate Carson’s poetry in a broader context, by showing how it continually negotiates between two prototypical representations of the self—the rural, nondescript space of Wordsworth’s Prelude and the urban-specific space of post-World-War-II English poetry. Its aim is to demonstrate that Carson’s works, like so many medical case studies about hypermnesia, grow almost organically out of a limited network of Belfast networks of streets and districts, which recur obsessively from one collection to the next so as to create a continuity akin to a poetics of the self.