Anne Carson’s sublime new collection
Anne Carson is often considered for the Nobel Prize. Peter Craven wants to know why she hasn’t won it yet.
When Anne Carson published The Autobiography of Red in 1998 she placed herself in the ranks of the writers by which the age would be judged. This story of a young boy who is absolutely credibly the red winged monster Geryon is a compelling lyrico–dramatic masterpiece which manages to traverse volcanoes and intimate friendship, as well as all the cut and thrust and dramatic intensity of being young and (to the self and others) intimately strange.
It was followed in 2001 by The Beauty of the Husband which was as subtly feminine as The Autobiography of Red was boyish. It was also heartbreaking in the evocation of a love that is grounded in physical attraction:
Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. / As I would again / if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible. / Beauty makes sex sex. / You if anyone grasp this – hush, let’s pass.
The way in which Carson uses the casual detail of love so conceived and all that surrounds it, a war game here, a leg there, is breathtaking.
And that’s true of everything she touches.
This new book, her first in eleven years, Wrong Norma, comes with an arresting image of a fox on its cover. It commands awe. Inside, Carson reveals herself as quite simply a genius who stretches what looks like the essay form or the prose poem into a thing of foreboding, of joy, of hilarity, of a poignancy as deep as being.
She is, in my view, quite simply the greatest poet writing in English and one of the most enriching, one of the most consistently astounding masters of language of the language in any medium. Harold Bloom called her “a wisdom poet” and Susan Sontag said she would read any word she wrote.
These essayistic prose poems are laden with depths of feeling. There’s a sketch of Conrad (or rather of his double). “He had a furtive tinge and a swank black overcoat – I thought at once of Joseph Conrad, as he is in formal photographs, with the not-quite-Western eyes and virtuosic goatee.”
There’s an allusion to the author of Nostromo and Heart of Darkness shooting himself in the chest and to what must have been an excruciating meeting with Thomas Hardy who had no small talk at all and once heard a man executed.
But this Canadian-born professor of Greek can do anything. Remember Crito to whom Socrates said he owed a cock to Asclepius?
There’s a wonderful reanimation of the great philosopher soon to be executed:
Speaking of terrible plans, though, don’t let Plato come to visit me. He’ll start quoting stuff I said in the old days, I shudder to hear it. Or he’ll lecture me on The Law. It’s not the law putting you to death, it’s the lawyers, he’ll say and I’ll say, Nice distinction but. Then he’ll go on about swans or gymnastics or who knows what, he’ll go on, go on - whenever I talk to our dear Plato I feel I’m drifting into eternity, you know what I mean.
Carson takes whatever ball has the weight of the world and runs with it (“Christopher Hitchens once said to me that having a child is like your own heart walking around in another body. So there went my own heart walking towards its own death, every millennium, every hour closer.”)
Wrong Norma is a book to humble any critic and makes you want to re-read every word by this sublime concocter of rhythms and apothegms that sum up the world like the Book of Ecclesiastes. Carson can do anything. Her An Oresteia (2009) took a play from each of the great tragedians and her version of Euripides’ Orestes sounds like David Foster Wallace at his most deadpan suburban postmodern.
And yet here’s a bit of her very straight revision of Sappho: ‘no: tongue breaks and thin / fire I racing under skin / and in eyes no sight and drumming / fills ears / and cold sweat holds me and shaking / grips me all, greener than grass / I am dead – or almost / I seem to me.’
Carson is a poet to place with the very great Russians Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. It will be a joke if she does not win the Nobel prize.
Run out and buy a copy of this book for whoever you know who cares about language. At $34.99 it’s a steal. But if you want to get your head attuned to the magic she swerves around, start with The Beauty of the Husband and The Autobiography of Red. Here is an extract from The Autobiography of Red which may give you a sense of its eerie grandeur and ease of unearthly drama:
And listen if you’re cold tonight you can sleep with me. With a look he added, / Just sleep. He left. / Geryon sat staring out over the roofs into the darkness. The Pacific at night is red / and gives off a soot of desire. / Every ten meters or so along the seawall / Geryon could see small twined couples. / They looked like dolls. / Geryon wishes he could envy them but he did not./ I have to get out of this place, / he thought. Immoral or not. / He climbed into his sleeping bag and / slept until dawn without moving.
Gorgeous.
Peter Craven is a culture critic.
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