Amazon.com Review
Though Anne Carson's poetry is shot through with the myths and images of the classical world, that ancient light helps illuminate contemporary situations and concerns. A classics professor at McGill University in Montreal, Carson has arrived in a surprisingly short time as one of Canada's finest poets. More than that, her exquisite, intelligent, highly original poems put her in the first rank of world poets. In
The Beauty of the Husband, subtitled
A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, she explores her ambiguous feelings toward a difficult but intriguing marriage. Each poem begins with a short quote from John Keats, whose idea that "beauty is truth" is the thread holding together a relationship with a man addicted to lying and philandering. A scoundrel ("He lied when it wasn't even convenient"), the husband is redeemed and forgiven almost everything because of beauty.
For Carson, the truth is "layered and elusive," hidden under the conversations of a thousand nights, nights when the lights were still on at dawn. There is a daring quality to Carson's work, a startling vision and perspective that will not be judged by normal standards. By penetrating to the core of a relationship, Carson stands convention on its head and finds "the light that pain brings." These poems bespeak the brilliance and shade of shape-shifting truth and conjure a freshness of language that shimmers. Somehow it seems fitting that the book itself, as an object to hold and behold, is also beautiful. --Mark Frutkin
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
After the Canadian classicist, polymath and MacArthur "genius grant" winner's much-acclaimed verse-novel Autobiography of Red (1997)Aand exactly a year after Men in the Off HoursAcomes a second book-length, mostly-narrative poem: this charming, edgy, insistently intertextual and finally heartbreaking sequence about unlikely courtship, modern marriage, divorce and "primordial eros and strife." The 29 short chapters Carson calls "Tangos" imagine and analyze, in jaggedly memorable verse, the ill-starred romance between the narrator and her charismatic, needy and unfaithful husband, who writes her romantic letters in her teenage years, introduces her to his tragic friend Ray, cheats on her with women named Merced and Dolor, takes her on a tour of the Peloponnese and begs her to reverse her decision to leave him. The plot emerges through Carson's meditative, elusive fragments, mysteriously isolated couplets, excerpts from versified conversations and letters, interior monologues and (as Carson's readers have come to expect) digressions on matters of classical scholarship. This kind of thing is imitated badly and often by others, but Carson's phraseology within poems remains her own: "Rotate the husband and expose a hidden side," she urges early on; later, "words// are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend/ to the ground." And if some of Carson's devotees seek just such cryptic moments, others will want, and get, more direct shows of emotion: "Proust/ used to weep over days gone by," she asks the reader, "do you?" (Feb.) Forecast: Carson was the subject of a New York Times Magazine feature this yearAshe is one of the very few poets writing now to cross over into trade-like sales. The wave of publicity may have crested, but this book should be well reviewed, and name recognition should kick in if the book is displayed along with current fiction, which the subtitle obviously encourages.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
