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Contains my favourite poem/essay of all time and is pretty much brain-stretching brilliance throughout.
there is something about how anne carson manages the very long poem that i will be pondering and studying for a very long time. obviously, gorgeous, knife-like. relentlessly absurd, which here leads to insight.
Brutal, fleshy, austere, the tang on the tongue of metal, or some unknown herb."No use telling you what it is.Just chew it and rub it on."
3.5. big fan of the first and last pieces
Is there a great poet of our lifetimes? I'm not qualified to answer the question, but Anne Carson may be the great poet of my personal, reading lifetime so far, at least.This work is well-rooted in classical thought and in narrative movement and scene. So when Carson shapes something new, it carries in its new sprigs the massive weight of Western thought. Its innovations, observations, and protests are all worthy of their history.Glass, Irony and God is a series of poems (I'm tempted to call the...
Rivals my dedication, even, to Autobiography of Red. Now I'm kicking myself for not having read it sooner. I was wary that the book would not be able to keep up its running start from "A Glass Essay," but I was intrigued by "TV Men," and so entranced by "The Fall of Rome" that I started it over again when I read the last installment, before going on to the rest of the book. The essay at the end, "The Gender of Sound" provides clues for you to unravel when reading Plainwater, which would be a sma...
"As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.""My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it."
"You remember too much,my mother said to me recently.Why hold onto all that? And I said,Where can I put it down?""Why all the fuss?" Asks one critic."She wanted liberty. Well didn't she have it?A reasonably satisfactory homelife,a most satisfactory dreamlife, why all this beating of wings?What was this cage, invisible to us,which she felt herself to be confined in?"Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,I am thinking as I stride over the moor.""She said,When you see these horrible image...
Anne Carson isn't just a god: she's my god.However: I prefer her on Greek and Roman texts, rather than Biblical ones, perhaps because that's where my own expertise tends. My favorites, easily, from this collection are "The Glass Essay" and "The Gender of Sound." I enjoyed "The Fall of Rome" but not nearly as much as the former two, and felt I barely cracked the rest—especially "TV Men," which read as extremely opaque to me, which is not usually how I read Anne Carson.
"Who in a nightmarecan help himself? (84)
Video ReviewI wish more people would read Anne Carson.This is one of Anne Carson's earliest collections (in the UK), it's called Glass, Irony, and God in the US. The Glass Essay accounts for half of this book (Short Talks is at the end, with some smaller works in between). The Glass Essay is going to be in my all-time favourite poems for a very long time, I prefer it even to Nox and Autobiography of Red.
It is very coldwalking into the long scraped April wind.At this time of the year there is no sunsetjust some movements inside the light and then as sinking away.These are meditations on mercy and the feminine. Issues of the divine struggle for capitalization, imploring Plato to find them as Form. This collection was powerful and I suspect if I had read it earlier in life it would have been devastating. It is as easily at home on the moors with Emily Brontë as it is wandering the Eternal City pon...
All talk about God generally bores the hell out of me. It's like listening to bros talk about sports. I don't get it; I don't get the importance; I don't understand the bonding and meaning that sports/God provides. So all the God stuff in this book didn't do much for me (and that includes Carson's frequent mention of soul etc., even if it's predicated with a certain amount of skepticism, it reminds me of my current arty male friends who are secret sports fans – they preface sports talk with an i...
greaty+permanently appreciate the way carson discusses womanhood from the perspective of someone who is both stymied by and disidentifies with it