Customer Reviews

Glass & God (Cape Poetry)

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This is some darned fine and aggravating poetry. The Glass Essay is a kind of hybrid of verse and essay; poetry with a point to make. The last piece, The Gender of Sound, is an essay --but you're not the sort of reader who reads reviews at Amazon if you're the sort who'll make it all the way through that sucker. I was with her for "the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo" and could follow her assertion that Hemingway was afraid of Gertrude Stein the meat-eater because of her voice. Where I lost her, and bet you will too, though I admire and am jealous of those who won't, is when she veers into "lyric fragments of the archaic poet Alkaios" which she reproduces in the original language and explicates with words I am absolutely unfamiliar with. But here's the rub. Just because I can't follow where this Canadian classics professor's brain can go in an essay doesn't mean I can't read her poetry, slap the ground, say holy cow, and want to go out and be a better man because of it. The rigorous scholarship she shows off in the essay informs the poetry and prods along my reading of it. The Truth About God, TV Men, and The Fall of Rome are poetry nobody's written before.

This book contains one traditional essay, a fascinating study of language and gender (classical Greece to Freud), and five poems which blur the line between essay and poetry. The net result is the exploration of very complex thoughts in a very readable form - a form that hides the complexity behind very concrete, common life images.

In "The Glass Essay" grief over a lost relationship, the relationship between the Bronte sisters, the relationship between mother-daughter, and the writings of Emily Bronte are explored in a seamless manner.

"The Truth About God" is a search for the meaning of God in our era. The opening stanza sets the tone for the exploration: "My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it." It draws from Beethoven's life, from Teresa of Avila, from the apophatic theology ...

"TV men" mixes Greek heroes and Gods with filming - meet Hector and Socrates in a new environment. "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide" explores personal relationships (or lack thereof) when language becomes a barrier not a bridge. "Book of Isaiah" explores the mindset behind the Biblical text of Isaiah.

The strength of this book is that the vast knowledge behind the writing is made accessible to the reader rather than being required of the reader. This is a book that makes the reader want to read more of the author's work.

Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God (New Directions, 1995)

Every review of Anne Carson's Glass, Irony, and God that I've come across since I read it myself has mentioned the book's first poem, "The Glass Essay," and called it, in one form or another, the book's strongest work. (Some of them do this by mentioning only this piece, so I admit to some inference on my part there.) And I will add my voice to that chorus; "The Glass Essay" is the piece in this book that makes it worth your time. I didn't like it nearly as much as a number of other reviewers did, but it's interesting and holds the attention, if there are parts of it that don't really come off as poetry.

The book goes downhill from there, with each successive poem getting less poetic (and less interesting), until it lands at the bottom of the hole with the final piece, an essay (which at least makes no attempt to be a poem) called "The Gender of Sound". I can praise it in one way-- it's one of the very few essays of its stripe that actually uses the word "gender" correctly, rather than as a substitute for the word "sex". (You'd think I wouldn't have to point this out when the book is written by a classics professor, but I've seen so many professionals-- including professors-- misuse the word "gender" that it surprises me to see it used correctly no matter who's doing the using.) Once one actually dives into the essay, however, is starts off ludicrous and gets ridiculous from there, including an assertion that Hemingway was scared of Gertrude Stein because she was, of all things, a meat-eater. One would think Hemingway, hunter that he was, would be far more scared of vegetarians.

One Amazon reviewer calls the book "[c]ertainly better than the journeys she has made into poetry exclusively recently." Which tells me to stay well away from those, at least. If you approach this as a book of essays, perhaps it will work for you. I had always heard it referred to as a book of poetry, and it misses that mark as widely as any book of poetry I've ever read. *

"The Glass Essay," the long poem sequence that begins "Glass, Irony and God" is a great poem: lost love, moms, Emily Bronte are its main topics; an ambitious, one-of-a-kind poem from an ambitious, one-of-a-kind writer.

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.

Aside 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.

Where Emily Dickinson uses dashes to reveal the full power of a particular word or line, Carson resorts to an unusual frequency of periods, creating abrupt shifts of focus that help the poem encompass as much subject as possible within just a few sparse lines. In "The Glass Essay," she resorts to this device immediately and often:

She lives on a moor in the north.
She lives alone.
Spring opens like a blade there.

Already, in just three short lines of the 38-page poem's fourth stanza, we encounter loneliness, landscape and season, distinctly echoing past triumphs such as "The Life of Towns," as in "Town of Spring Once Again," for instance:

Rain hissed down the windows.
Longings from a great distance.
Reached us.

Despite the periods, the enjambment of these lines is obvious, and more startling. Drops of rain become "longings from a great distance" but, at the same time, the origin of these "longings" remains mysterious. From where are they "reaching" the speaker? The reader is left to imagine and savor.

It is in Carson's skill for weaving Emily Bronte's persona together with the speaker's, however, that "The Glass Essay's" abundant despair becomes most compelling. Like Bronte, whose storied alienation and seclusion comprise much of the poem's focus, the speaker identifies deeply with the moor's landscape. "My lonely life around me like a moor," she says, going on to describe the moor as "paralyzed with ice" in a moment of pathetic fallacy.

Similarly, just as Bronte is described as a "soul trapped in glass" and a "wacher" who "wached the poor core of the world," the speaker becomes just as imprisoned and secluded, obsessively noting the minutest observations as she gazes into "the curtainless morning" like someone under a life sentence. By poem's end, though, the speaker emerges from the malaise that Bronte only escapes through death. "I gave up watching," the speaker confesses, "I lived my life." Finally, in the speaker's own inability to endure the intense loneliness under which Bronte lived (and died), Emily Bronte's own life struggle becomes that much more palpable.

What makes this book worth it is the very first essay in the collection, The Glass Essay, a work that is written in verse and that is tinged with the kind of mix of immagination and scholarship that has made Carson's work so popular. By far, however, this is one of her best works. Certainly better than the journeys she has made into poetry exclusively recently. Read this essay before any of her other work and you will have an excellent primer for this evocative writer!

I picked up this book after reading a Anne Carson poem in the New Yorker. She is smart and unapologetic about it, sometimes writing about things beyond my own knowledge. All done in a wonderfully poetic hand. I can see myself buying more of her work.

This book of poetry is purely amazing. It's worth every cent I paid to discover the delightful poetry of Ms. Carson. My favorite poem is "God's Justice" which I share below. Buy this book and experience the magic of her words.

God's Justice

By Anne Carson

In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks.

On the day He was to create justice

God got involved in making a dragonfly

and lost track of time.

It was about two inches long

with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.

God watched it bend its tiny wire elbows

as it set about cleaning the transparent case of its head.

The eye globes mounted on the case

rotated this way and that

as it polished every angle.

Inside the case

which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank

God could see the machinery humming

and He watched the hum

travel all the way down turquoise dots to the end of the tail

and breathe off as light.

Its black wings vibrated in and out.

From: "Glass, Irony and God" page 49

I first encountered Anne Carson in a non-fiction class. I somewhat despised poetry (and still kind of do), but was pleasantly surprised by "The Glass Essay," a poem/lyric essay hybrid sort of thing. I absolutely loved it.

While I was not necessarily disappointed with the rest of "Glass, Irony, and God," the surprise was not as pleasant. I suppose I expected a lot more of the same and simply did not get it. While I can see the beautiful, but grotesque nudes and feel the aching acceptance of loss, I cannot even remember what the other stories were about (I re-read the book two or three months ago).

While I will most likely read more of Carson (she's pretty much a non-fiction staple), it is with the hope that "The Glass Essay" is not the only pleasant surprise.

when i read guy davenport's name on the cover of carson's book as writer of the introduction i immediately bought the book, such is my trust in the davenport name. and i was not disappointed. my first exposure to anne carson, a scholar who reads greek, a feminist, a highly imaginative writer, and, i save poet for last. she's a classicist with a post modern sensibility. so she can write tv men, profiles of, not all men, there's sappho, and not all human, there's sleep, in addition to hektor, on a tv shoot, artaud, my favorite - as a script in unrhymed tercets, the first line of each tercet listing artaud's scene: artaud is mad, his face is mad, his body is mad, and so on, the second line of the tercets describes the actor in the scene, and the third line of the tercets, in italics, are the actor's words, and sokrates.

the glass essay isn't an essay, but a dantean narrative, also in unrhymed tercets, of a feminine trinity, the mother, the daughter and the spirit of emily bronte in the form of a book, the collected works of emily bronte the daughter brings on a visit to her mother's house, a house on a moor, where she walks along the moor, reads and reflects on the life of emily and talks with her mother, the daughter there after a man in her life, named law, has left her.

the truth about god and the book of isaiah -- the first is a speculative poem, the second an interpretation of the imagined relationship between god and the prophet who walked the land three years naked.

the fall of rome: a traveller's guide, derives its' title from the line in the poem `i think i will call my nightmare the fall of rome.' and `alaric invaded rome in 410 ad./ the nightmare/ was waiting for him.' i bet. alaric lay siege to rome three times. the structuring of carson's fall of rome reminds me of horace's odes. horace, like alaric, spent time in rome, unlike alaric, writing poetry, a sort of dream when compared with waiting for alaric, the nightmare. carson doesn't mention horace, but for me his spirit resides along right there beside alaric in a symbolic description by carson `the pozzo di san patrizio/ was built by pope clement vii/ to supply the town with water/ in case of a siege. ... there are 248 comfortable steps/ from the top to the bottom of the well: 248 spiral back up./ they are not the same steps./ designed concentrically/ the two staircases fit/ one within the other ... so that two people/ one coming up,/ the other going down,/ can never meet.'

the gender of sound, an essay, with endnotes and bibliography, about the marginalizing of the voice of woman in greek and roman societies, by freud, of gertrude stein by hemingway, and of female politicians by male politicians, continues the feminist prose tradition of mary daly and adrienne rich.