later this year.While experimental verse often risks feeling contrived or convoluted, Anne Carson's ambitious voice builds on accomplishments of previous works such as 'The Life of Towns' - always feeling genuine and purposeful, yielding moments of intense irony, rhythm and blade-sharp line breaks facilitated by Carson's idiosyncratic punctuation.Īside from grammatical and linguistic devices, though, another successful experiment is Carson's capacity for engaging in biography and autobiography simultaneously in 'The Glass Essay,' as Emily Bronte's life becomes a mirror for the speaker's own predicament and contributes an additional layer of complexity and pathos. Her collection Men in the Off Hours is coming out in the U.S.A. Her new collection The Beauty of a Husband (a fiction essay in 29 tangos), is due to appear in 2001. It is a pain which, together with her often idiosyncratic punctuation and the very personal music this produces, suggests a kinship with Emily Dickinson, whom she often quotes.

The reason is in the sweat of suffering, in the erotic, bleeding pain that emanates from her lines. The tale of Hercules who kills the monster Geryon and steals his red cattle, in her version becomes the story of a doomed love affair between two boys ( Autobiography of Red) the going-round-in-circles of a fierce marital row is predicted with a quote from Parmenides: ‘It is all one to me where I start – I’ll arrive there again soon enough’īut neither her subtle narrative skill, nor her strangely melodious verse can explain why, when the mind reads Anne Carson, the heart reads along.

It is a part of her life and personality that carries over into her poetry, the inspiration and background for her literary work, consisting of essays ( Eros the Bittersweet, The Economy of the Unlost) and a mixture of essays and poetry ( Plainwater Glass, Irony and God).Īny associations of classical scholarship with stuffiness are quickly dispelled by Anne Carson’s talent for reviving the poetry and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and for making them part of our modern experience. Anne Carson has been teaching classical Greek literature at leading universities in Canada and the United States for the past twenty years.

Glass irony and god