Plainwater : Essays and Poetry [Paperback]

Anne Carson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Random House of Canada, Limited (2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0676972748
• ISBN-13: 978-0676972740
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur "Genius" Award.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Plainwater is a book heady with the theme of loss, June 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Hardcover)

Plainwater is a work of art that is unlike any contemporary piece of writing I've read. It's heady with the themes of loss and freedom and the narrator speaks from a place of quiet intensity that burns more vehemently with each observation. She is on a road-trip, the narrator, with a companion that threatens an isolation more profound than any found alone. Constantly is the backdrop, the theme, and the language of water. One can get lost in Carson's language and, like any work of poetry, the language crosses the line and becomes something else: you are at one point no longer reading but are taking in the narrator's interior life as your own. The landscape of your mind and the story has become one and the same through the median skin of the words. Can't recommend this book highly enough. Like Glass, Irony and God- it bespeaks of maps not really charted by any other contemporary writer but maps that any woman will recognize as partly her own. It crosses into philosophy and parable simply in its adherance to its own interiority: like Hesse, Goethe, Novalis, Holderlin, Rilke et al... it shifts into another kind of story, the kinds that are shamanistic, that place in the reader reflections of their own truth.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the ancient world emerges, January 21, 2003

By 

marci dean (notich, tn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Paperback)

wow. i first picked up this book last week and am blown away. the work of anne carson seems to be speaking from a world only newly unearthed...grainy and weird and wonderful!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars my favorite book ever, September 28, 2002

By 

"bicycleaesthetic" (portland, or) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Paperback)

the last section of this book-- the anthropology of water-- is my favorite piece of writing i have ever read. it's amazing. you can read it 50 times and still get something new out of it.