'Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today.' - Michael Ondaatje
Anne Carson was the first woman to win the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She has also won a Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan. Her most recent collection, Decreation, was published by Cape in 2006.
The most instantly penetrating of contemporary poets... she has
great intellectual and emotional knowledge, a vast habitat, to
every bit of which she brings powerful perception and a freshness
as startling as a loud knock at the door
*New York Times Book Review*
Anne Carson, a Canadian, is quite remarkable. She really has
captured me. I have been reading her obsessively over the past
months. A stunning writer
*Paris Review*
In every form we find a sly, plainspoken eroticism that is a
perfect complement to her sly, plainspoken intellectual ardour... a
truly great poet of the 21st century
*Time Out*
She is an exceptionally exciting new voice
*Daily Telegraph*
Carson writes ina language any poet would kill for: sensuous and
funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted
*New York Times Book Review*
After the Canadian classicist, polymath and MacArthur "genius grant" winner's much-acclaimed verse-novel Autobiography of Red (1997)Äand exactly a year after Men in the Off HoursÄcomes 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 yearÄshe 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 Cahners Business Information.
The most instantly penetrating of contemporary poets... she has
great intellectual and emotional knowledge, a vast habitat, to
every bit of which she brings powerful perception and a freshness
as startling as a loud knock at the door -- Calvin Bedient * New
York Times Book Review *
Anne Carson, a Canadian, is quite remarkable. She really has
captured me. I have been reading her obsessively over the past
months. A stunning writer -- Harold Bloom * Paris Review *
In every form we find a sly, plainspoken eroticism that is a
perfect complement to her sly, plainspoken intellectual ardour... a
truly great poet of the 21st century -- Rebecca Wolff * Time Out
*
She is an exceptionally exciting new voice -- John Lancaster *
Daily Telegraph *
Carson writes ina language any poet would kill for: sensuous and
funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted -- Ruth
Padel * New York Times Book Review *
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