Review
“Exhilarating . . . Carson takes risks, subverts literary conventions, and plays havoc with our expectations. She is a wonder: an unconventional poet who has a huge following among today’s readers of poetry and whose work has been honored with our most prestigious literary awards . . . When it comes to content, most poetry is boring compared to Carson’s . . . She writes as if every poet, writer, religious thinker, and philosopher who has ever lived is still our contemporary . . . Carson is immensely learned. [Her] prose, with its clarity, compactness, and memorable epigrams, reminds me of Emerson . . . To work with fragments of ancient lyric poems, as Carson does, is to [be] an archaeologist of the invisible whose tools are her learning and her imagination . . . She is interested in her characters in a way that most poets are not. Her language is the language of fiction and the manner in which the stories are told resembles magical realism with its wild imaginings and its carnival atmosphere. As for her subject matter, she writes perceptively and amusingly about men and women in love, their jealousies, their misunderstandings, and the solitude which they are not able to overcome . . . The essays in Decreation are full of marvelous insights . . . What the poet and the authentic thinker share, according to Heidegger, is their ability to wonder at how things exist and to live with that wonder. Carson reminds us that poeticizing in this broader philosophical sense and in the narrow sense of the poetic have always been related. The play of philosophical ideas makes [all] her books worth reading . . . Enthralling, masterful, engaging, stunning, inspired, impressive, profoundly moving, poignant, probing.”
–The New York Review of Books
“Cool, resolute, smart, and lovely . . . Carson has emerged in the last two decades as a kind of prophet of the unknowable. Decreation may be her loneliest book–a theological treatise and dramatization of how to escape one’s self . . . Carson attempts [this task] with great tenderness, framing the undoing as a work of love that compels one to forsake oneself in order to be something more–truer, more luminous, and also more transient. Carson moves from form to form–poetry, essay, screenplay–and from body to body . . . In the shape traced by Carson’s rapid flight patterns one can almost discern a transcendent emptiness, uninhabitable to more stationary souls.”
–The Village Voice
“Count on Carson, brilliant and larky, to dance you out of the quotidian. A frolicsome and philosophical poet who channels voices both mythic and historical as she opens new portals onto the human psyche, Carson tinkers expertly with form and complex concepts in her ninth highly original book . . . Carson is at her electrifying best when she pairs incisive essays with piercing poems to explore the magical properties of seep, to explicate the sublime . . . and to grapple with ‘spiritual daring’ . . . Carson’s inquiry into the paradoxical ‘decreation’ of the self in the quest for the divine exemplifies her gift for joining erudition with feeling, insight with wit, and a sense of cosmic continuity with personal liberation . . . Commanding.”
–Booklist (boxed, starred review)
“What Walden Pond was to Thoreau, what the sea was to Conrad and Melville, what seeing is to John Berger, Greek and Latin are to Anne Carson: an immense space–because the words now contain the world that once existed around them–that allows her imagination a measureless boundary . . . Glass, Irony and God, one of the finest debut books of poetry published in English in the twentieth century, was written with an almost inconceivable urgency and power . . . It is difficult to think of Carson apart from her sources and subjects, which are never more powerfully on display than in her new book, Decreation. It’s a kind of Anne Carson Reader–populated with such icons as Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Porete, and Michelangelo Antonioni–and her most cohesive, integrated book since Glass, Irony and God . . . Carson’s poetry and prose, scholarly and intrepid, move with an almost unparalleled swiftness among myths, ancient languages, and contemporary life, casting a semiological eye on those things that exemplify our culture’s obsession with surfaces. [Her] work brings readers to a mediated but unmitigated place where men and women, with the stress on the latter, are enmeshed in nature, as in The Metamorphoses. An implacable victimization is active in her work, yet these tortuous turns are also seen coolly as the price of being alive; and her ‘ecstasy,’ a subject she reinvestigates in Decreation, allows her to stand outside herself and present these examples–this slide show of her icons–to her readers . . . Carson has the ability to isolate details so that a few lines of poetry can carry the weight of a short story . . . In Decreation, when she clears a path to the sublime, it rages, froths, and foams; it is informed by an energy verging on madness. [A] wide and wild variety of texts . . . If anyone knows how to be alluring, it is Carson . . . Affecting, fascinating, remarkable, beautiful, stimulating in a way that is manifestly taut and poetic, pitch-perfect, disarming.”
–BookForum
“For the past two decades, Canadian classics professor and international poetry phenom Anne Carson has produced a diverse body of work . . . Carson’s work has never fit into any ready-made category. Decreation, her latest, is no exception . . . Carson’s core subjects have remained big and intense–love, God, death, beauty, truth, desire. But even when she’s quoting Aristotle, Carson’s work rarely comes off as academic pyrotechnics or rococo wank-offery. Rather, she uses her scholarship to help us figure out why love is so hard, and the role death plays in life . . . Carson evokes an idea and then settles in to explore it from a variety of angles . . . What is often surprising is that Carson doesn’t limit herself to Classical thought. She not only acknowledges that popular culture exists–which already distinguishes her from most contemporary poets–but is also inspired by it and integrates it into her classical world. This enriches her language immensely . . . Winning, heartbreaking . . . As Carson mixes new and old worlds, she makes the big ideas she tackles relevant to our own lives . . . The book deserves wide attention. At its best, it’s Marlene Dietrich meets Gertrude Stein set to a Frances Lai soundtrack. Her many fans, from both L Word and academic contingents, should find much to enjoy.”
–Time Out New York
“In 13 intricately related, supple and confident works in verse and prose, eminent poet and classicist Carson takes on the meaning and function of sleep; the art and attitudes of Samuel Beckett; the last days of an elderly mother; guns; a solar eclipse; ‘Longing, a Documentary’; the films of Michelangelo Antonioni; and the vexing, paradoxical projects of women mystics, among them Simone Weil and medieval heretic Marguerite Porete . . . Brilliant, unusual.”
–Publishers Weekly
“One of the most interesting gatherings of material that any poet has published within living memory . . . Carson’s tone is light, teasing, and playful. In a voice of near childlike innocence, she asks extraordinarily difficult and searching questions about the nature of sleep and the idea of sacredness and the soul. She teases the reader intellectually rather in the way that Gertrude Stein used to tease, by a strange use of repetition, and by often using silliness as a route to the exploration of seriousness. She is quite unlike any other poet writing today.”
–The Economist
“[Carson’s] work here is provocative, her language intriguing, and her themes universal. Describing ‘decreation’ as the state in which the self dissolves, Carson imagines other writers and artists whose works illustrate and/or parallel her own experience . . . She offers glimpses into a contemporary relationship between mother and daughter (presumably her mother and herself), love and marriage, and what it means to be a woman. Personal experience permeates the collection, and the reader is allowed to draw from the wisdom and hard-won experience of the poet’s personae.”
–Library Journal
About the Author
Anne Carson was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; was honored with the 1996 Lannan Award and the 1997 Pushcart Prize, both for poetry; and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. In 2001 she received the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry–the first woman to do so; the Griffin Poetry Prize;and the Los Angeles TimesBook Prize. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan.
From The Washington Post
Several years ago, Anne Carson told a reporter from the New York Times Magazine that she has no main themes as a writer: "I have no idea. Whatever I bump into I do. It's an act of impulse." The poet as a wandering, impulsive omnivore has long been a sturdy, off-the-rack sensibility, but it's one that doesn't really suit Carson. After all, in Decreation, her eighth book and first new one in five years, she once again finds herself writing about people, most often women, who pine for relief from longing and regret: the ancient Greek poet Sappho, the literary critic Longinus (whose treatise On the Sublime preserved a fragment of Sappho's "He seems to me equal to gods that man," a poem that's one of Carson's touchstones), the medieval French heretic Marguerite Porete, the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni and the writers Virginia Woolf and Simone Weil. Moreover, like most of Carson's previous books, Decreation is a hybrid in which various genres -- poetry, essay and drama -- bump into each other. Its mixture of genres and personalities makes the book at once fascinating and frustrating, intricate and slack. The title is taken from an essay by Weil, who defined "decreation" as "undoing the creature in us." The essay in which Carson elaborates on Weil's idea, "Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God," is the book's centerpiece and a companion of sorts to Carson's previously published essay about women in ancient Greece, "Putting Her in Her Place." Carson is drawn to selves who desire immersion and disintegration into an absolute inhuman essence (in the case of Porete and Weil, the essence is God). What's intriguing about her portrayal of this sensibility is the utter absence of melancholy. She doesn't say whether loss of the self is something any of these women try to stem or evade; instead, she focuses on the paradox of someone seeking self-affirmation in an experience of dispossession and dissolution. Carson's hybrid books have been praised for disintegrating the boundaries between prose and verse. But this praise has often been based on a mistaken assumption -- that cross-fertilization automatically occurs whenever different genres of writing appear between the covers of a single book. In Decreation, the juxtaposition of prose and verse has the opposite effect. Instead of disintegrating the differences between genres, it reinforces them. Going from verse to essay to drama, one can't help but notice that Carson's hand is surer, and her language sharper, in some genres more than others. Carson's poems sometimes contain a stirring line, image or allusion, but too often they are dulled by a dearth of music, a versified prosiness and formal gimmicks (such as eschewing the standard left-hand margin in favor of center alignment). With the exception of a series called "Gnosticisms," many of the poems in Decreation are like a borrowed home: lived in but never owned. The book's dramatic pieces are also a mixed bag. "Lots of Guns: An Oratorio for Five Voices" is in part an allegory of current political turmoil: Yes well I have no choice. Our temples are at stake. Our nutmeg is at stake. Once again it all comes down to nutmeg! God promised us that nutmeg is our truth. Other spices exist. That is not the point. I've lost track of the point. Further evidence of your sedition. This is amusing but a little too clever. And while the three-part opera "Decreation," about Aphrodite, Porete and Weil, quickly garnered acclaim after the second part was performed at the University of Michigan in 1999, on the page it sounds flat and ends up functioning as an appendix to the essay of the same name that precedes it. Carson has a speculative mind, and in "Decreation" and the book's three other essays it truly flourishes. Her approach in each essay is the same. After establishing her subject in a few sentences, she glosses the thoughts of three or four classical and modern writers on the chosen topic. Carson works by apposition, juxtaposing writers and ideas and demanding that the reader make chance calculations about the correspondences between them. In "Totality: The Color Of Eclipse," she begins by noting that the root of "eclipse" is the ancient Greek ekleipsis, "a forsaking, quitting, abandonment." From there she begins a short, lively survey of writers -- Herodotus, Pindar, Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard -- who have treated a total eclipse as an analogy for marriage. Carson doesn't pretend to chronicle the analogy's maturation over time or demonstrate how one writer's use of it is indebted to another's. Instead, she unpacks each analogy without overtly comparing them or drawing any conclusions, thereby creating an incongruous marriage of reflections about marriage. Prose is by definition pedestrian: One of the roots of the word "prose" is the Latin prosus, which means to move forward. In Decreation, thanks to the intellectual skips and gambols of her essays, Carson gamely tugs at and twists that root. John Palattella writes regularly about poetry for the Nation. Reviewed by John Palattella
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Outwardly His Life Ran Smoothly
Comparative figures: 1784 Kant owned 55 books, Goethe 2300, Herder 7700.
Windows: Kant had one bedroom window, which he kept shut at all times, to
forestall insects. The windows of his study faced the garden, on the the other side of
which was the city jail. In summer loud choral singing of the inmates wafted in.
Kant asked that the singing be done sotto voce and with windows closed. Kant had
friends at city hall and got his wish.
Tolstoy: Tolstoy thought that if Kant had not smoked so much tobacco The
Critique of Pure Reason would have been written in language you could under-
stand (in fact he smoked one pipe at 5 AM).
Numbering: Kant never ate dinner alone, it exhausts the spirit. Dinner guests, in
the opinion of the day, should not number more than the Muses nor less than the
Graces. Kant set six places.
Sensualism: Kant's favourite dinner was codfish.
Rule Your Nature: Kant breathed only through his nose.
