Men in the Off Hours (Paperback)

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Amazon.com Review

Yes, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds--and minor poets. The major ones tend to operate in a trough-and-peak pattern, producing a dozen lesser works for every masterpiece. Still, Anne Carson pushes this tendency to extremes, and nowhere more markedly than in Men in the Off Hours, which contains some of the best and worst lyrics of her entire career.

First, the good news: Nobody has written more acutely about perception--about the chaotic collision of our senses with the real world--since the glory days of Wallace Stevens. Not that Carson echoes the airborne rhetoric of her great predecessor. Her fractured, zigzagging lines deliberately avoid the kind of gravity that was his trademark, and she likes to deflect the grand manner by ratcheting her diction upward (into Delphic utterance) or downward (into baby talk, if the baby happens to be Gertrude Stein). Still, like Stevens, she makes us think about how we think. She dislikes any attempt to remove cognition from its rustling Heraclitean framework. No wonder she ends up scolding taxidermy freak John James Audubon, whose point-and-shoot portraiture rubs her the wrong way: "In the salons of Paris and Edinburgh // where he went to sell his new style / this Haitian-born Frenchman / lit himself // as a noble rustic American / wired in the cloudless poses of the Great Naturalist. / They loved him // for the 'frenzy and ecstasy' / of true American facts." We comprehend things only in flux and, as Carson explains in "Essay on What I Think About Most," by mistake:

...what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error,
the willful creation of error,
the deliberate break and complication of mistakes
out of which may arise
unexpectedness.

Now for the bad news: Men in the Off Hours includes too ample a serving of Carson's weaker, semiprecious work--short lyrics in which she bends over backwards for an antipoetic poetic effect (if such a thing is possible). "Epitaph: Europe" is precisely the kind of freeze-dried surrealism she should avoid. And the spitballs this classicist fires at television in a piece like "TV Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War" are truly puzzling. Why blame the tube for our cultural sins, particularly when the average NYPD Blue rerun contains more experiential fiber than most contemporary poetry? Still, Carson's blazing successes easily overshadow her failures. And those who have found her too recondite, too forbidding, need only take a look at the concluding poem, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." This elegy to the poet's mother is touching, emotionally direct, and completely original: an instant (to use a phrase Carson would probably loathe) classic. --James Marcus --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Carson's demanding style has been among the decade's most intriguing: critics with little else in common look forward to her inimitable and argumentative poems. Carson made her last splash with the narrative poem Autobiography of Red. This follow-up volume of short poems incorporates a brace of unusual genres--quick verse-essays, epitaphs and epigrams, predictions and "oracles," pseudo-bibliographical "drafts" and "fragments," verse-portraits (the Biblical Lazarus, a circus "Flatman"), invented proverbs, and extremely free translations. (One of several amazing versions of Catullus begins "Before my holy stoning in the wet kisses and the smell of sperm/ I drove an ambulance for the Red Cross.") Like her previous work, these poems draw frequently on Carson's classical training (she teaches Greek and Latin at McGill University in Montreal). Her harsh, carved lines, clear closures and periphrases can sound like attempts to forge an English answer to Greek lyric. The opening "Epitaph: Zion" initiates readers into the sudden twists, astonishments and mysteries in the longer work to follow: the whole poem reads: "Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives/ Were fragile, the wind/ Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather/ Who drank a bowl of elsewhere." Potential keys to many poems reside in two brisk, scholarly prose essays at the beginning and near the end--"Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War" and "Dirt and Desire: Female Pollution in Antiquity." Woolf reappears in the poems as a principle of inner experience and subjective time, Thucydides as the opposing principle of linear time, narrative, action, event. Carson's other new works invoke, describe and quote Hokusai, Audobon, Tolstoy, Augustine, Edward Hopper, Akhmatova and Artaud; it is the measure of Carson's striking talent that the men and women in her lines sound, at base, always and only like her.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375707565
• ISBN-13: 978-0375707568
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #355,516 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exaltations of Mistake, October 4, 2001

By	Carlomar Daoana (Manila Philippines) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Men in the Off Hours (Hardcover)

Susan Sontag, one of the foremost thinkers and writers of today, says of Anne Carson: "[Anne Carson] is one of the few writers in English that I would read anything she wrote." Such regard for Carson is justified. One of the premiere poets today re-inventing and rediscovering language to meet our present demands of articulation, in the true post-modernist fashion, Carson has come up recently with a collection called, Men in the Off Hours, finalist to the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Men in the Off Hours contains poems and prose pieces that lay the groundwork for various intersections of opposites: past and the present, the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. Here we can find the paintings of Edward Hopper turned into poems as footnoted by St. Augustine's words in the Confession, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf conversing about war, and a host of other characters summoned in the forefront of contemporary image-making: Sappho, Artaud, Tolstoy, Lazarus, Antigone, Akhmatova. They can be found in the chain of poems titled "TV Men" which re-images and re-imagines the lives of these personages, how they correspond to the contemporary definitions of the gaze, as shaped and articulated by woman-as-director, woman-as-creator.
One of the best poems in the collection is "Essay on What I Think about Most" where Carson exalts the element of mistake, both in art and in our lives. It then makes a literary exegesis of a fragment poem written by Alkman, a 7th century B.C. Spartan poet, of how it masterfully harnesses the conceit of the mistake, and is interspersed with quotes by Aristotle. The persona declares: "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection."
"Irony is not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve," on the other hand, is composed of a series of prose poems that narrativizes the days of Catherine Deneuve. Here Carson imagines herself as Deneuve, somewhere in a room in an academy in France, lecturing about Socrates and Sappho, catching all the knowing gazes by one of her female students, as the snow outside her window drives through everything like rain. The prose poems are short and episodic, almost breathless, representing the smallness of Daneuve's life, and the frailty of relationships, against a backdrop of a long, bitter winter.
Carson is at best intellectual and scholarly in this collection. Her far-reaching vocabulary touches various human endeavors like myth, archaeology, science, history. Because of this pre-occupation with facts and quotes, Carson has debunked the lyric, freeing words from imposed musicality that poetry is almost always made to assume. Her poems are minefields, nuclear antechambers, blackholes. They are reckless, energetic, centrifugal. This attitude of Carson problematizes the poem as insular and solitary, breaking up its gates to the gift of intertext, where meaning yields to multiplicity.
Told in such exquisite and piercing language, her long essay (complete with an annotated bibliography), "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity," meanwhile interprets classical configurations of the woman body's and its supposed vulnerability for defilement. She calls forth thinkers from various epochs who have shaped and structured the constructs with which we define one another as members of the human tribe. She then launches into an analysis of the motivation behind ancient weddings and a fragment poem by Sappho, things that speak well of the kind of boundaries we have put up as a defense from one another, as how Carson puts it: "As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another-whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis."
Men in the Off Hours culminates with an essay Carson has written for her newly departed mother titled, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." Carson proves that she is indeed a "poet of the heartbreak," as she remembers the simple gestures of her mother when she was still here, articulating the loneliness attendant to the experience of grief, and how she found solace and comfort from the diary entries of Virginia Woolf during her last days. She grieves: "Did she think of me-somewhere in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now..."
Carson is one of the first writers to conquer the frontiers of the 21st century poetry, the first to be able to storm through the paltry and outdated definitions of language and language-making. Here is a poet who is courageous, intelligent, and fierce but at the same time tender and forgiving toward the kind of passages we undertake, solitary or communal. She always reminds us that the love for imperfection is valid and that we are irredeemable from transience, but guides us though the maze of fear evoked by these truths, if only to discover the joy and surprise that come from being here, the ordinary time we seek to mark.
Carson's opus can well be summarized in the epitaph she used for her mother:
such
abandon
ment
such
rapture

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deliberately Unstrung Hours, July 27, 2001

By	Judy Lightfoot (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

... Anne Carson's two previous books string their wonderful perturbations along narrative lines, but "Men in the Off Hours" is a deliberately unstrung chaos, which Carson calmly, almost academically sorts through. Metaphor, she decides, is "the willful creation of error," and poetry consists of misunderstandings and mistranslations (even by a classics professor like herself). Since "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection," the poet must try not only to accept mistakes but to enjoy them. Can she learn to accept the death of her mother as a kind of mistake, or to enjoy having taken as her "true love" a man who left her?

Such a wholesale interpretation of the book is risky. Carson is always, as she says in "Men," "uneasy with any claim to know exactly / what a poet means to say," and her poetry generally avoids the confessional mode. But this collection is filled with refugees from torments as searing as love's betrayal. Lazarus, the mad Artaud, Anna Akhmatova, the birds Audubon shot, wired and plumped into lifelike poses--their agony tells us truths. So do Carson's wisecracks, little word salads, and sardonic hurrahs ("At our backs is a big anarchy. If you are strong you can twist a bit off / and pound on it-- our freedom!"). This is a wickedly disquieting book, with footnotes. Its reassurances are its glinting intelligence and confident, humorous voice--when Carson read in Seattle last month, every syllable was as clear and knowing as laughter.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, beautifully written, but flat, March 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Men in the Off Hours (Hardcover)

Few great literary figures are absent from these poems, there are comparisons of views of Virginia Woolf, Thucydides, Emily Dickinson, Freud, Augustine, Sappho, Tolstoy, Akhmatova, just to name a few. Carson's deftly goes into the minds of these greats and with convincing conviction from the female brain, not just a female perspective compared to that of a dominating male perspective. These poems are skillful and some will not doubt argue brilliant. These poem's flaws (both individually and collectively) are that they go only far enough to engage the mind, ignoring the rest of the reader's body. No chills. No growls. No tears. No laughs. This leaves us with beautiful, but flat poems. This is a sad departure from Carson's last book, _Autobiography of Red_. Some of the poems fall apart due to meticulous overwriting as in the case of the Tolstoy selection of "TV Men" where Carson combines her own lines with Tolstoy's giving far too much precedence of the intellect of the poem over the rest.