Review by New York Times Review
ANNE CARSON has a history of doing unpredictable and genre-crossing things. A classical scholar who came late to poetry, she rose, in the '90s and '00s quickly and deservedly, to prominence. Many readers (including me) first knew her through "The Glass Essay," a 38-page multipart lyric narrative in 1995's "Glass, Irony and God." The poem is an inspired mash-up: a confessional-style "I" recounts a breakup with a lover and a visit to an aged mother while considering the life and writings of Emily Brontë and reporting on her surrealist visions of nudes. The yoking of disparates, the old and the new, continues to be a Carson strategy. She's generally claimed by the poetry world, but her books often contain swaths of lyric, critical or essayistic prose, as well as translation, dramatic dialogue and visual art. Many toil in the interstices of genre; Carson's palatable, popular, sophisticated and who-cares approach may have done the most and best work in the last two decades to stop people worrying so much about what's poetry and what's not. At her best, she's among our most exciting poets. At her less-than-best she's reliably ingenious, full of charisma and surprise. Lesser poets who behave more predictably and risk less are easier to praise - and not as important. Each new Carson project comes with new parameters. Last year she published "Antigonick," a handwritten, illustrated retelling of the Sophocles classic. Before that was "Nox," a mass-reproduction of a handmade accordion-pleated art-book-in-a-box that Carson created in memory of her brother, the centerpiece of which was a translation and word-by-word interrogation of a Catullus poem. I think "The Glass Essay" is still her best work; others would argue for "Autobiography of Red," a verse-novel that reimagines the 10th labor of Herakles - killing the red-winged monster Geryon and stealing his herd of red cattle - as suggested by fragments from the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus. In "Autobiography," Carson imagines Geryon as a shy, damaged, artistic teenager with wings who has a doomed love affair with Herakles, a charismatic, selfish rebel. "Autobiography" is whimsical, dark, interestingly creepy and moving. It seems to me - though many readers disagree - to be created out of willed obsession. Geryon and Herakles reunite in "Red Doc> ," middle-aged. Geryon is now G, still a cattle-herder (of sorts) if not much of an artist, though he reads Proust and Daniil Kharms, the Russian Soviet-era surrealist-absurdist. Herakles is now called Sad But Great - "Sad," for short. Sad is a traumatized veteran of a recent war. This adds a welcome political dimension rarely seen elsewhere in Carson's work. G and Sad take a road trip, ending up at a strange clinic in an icy northland. A handful of other characters derive - nominally - from Greek mythology. Hermes is a mysterious man in a silver tuxedo who shows up every now and then to guide them. Io - the nymph turned into a cow by Zeus, then maddened by Hera's gadfly - is the loveliest member of G's herd, a sexy musk ox: She is a beast constructed for smooth striding. Now long pelvic muscles organize her and the vast loosejointed shoulders glide forward into movement. Carson has, over the years, moved closer to bizarreness for the sake of bizarreness - but she still pulls it off, mainly because the impulse behind it is mischief. "Can I get away with this?" she seems to ask. And she does - because it's fun. She's having fun. Here's what else she gets away with: Most of the poems in "Red Doc>" are delivered in narrow strips of type, justified at both margins like newspaper columns. It's a format that counterintuitively speeds you down the page, as if creating a chute for language. It also constricts in ways that put useful pressure on the poems' wild music and wilder state of mind. Carson remains a master of idiosyncratic figures, delivering metaphor and simile casually and suddenly, while keeping her language idiomatically oddball. Metaphors slide out of clipped fragments, torque themselves from sentences pell-mell and complex. One poem describes the landscape G and Sad drive through: CROWS AS BIG as barns rave overhead. Still driving north. Night is a slit all day is white. Panels of torn planet loom and line up one behind the other to the far edge of what eyes can see. Or: Sad "loves driving into this emptiness" and his eyes are "bluer than holes in blue." That's breathtaking, filling Sad's eyes with sky and absence, maybe blindness, and melancholy. A steady diet of this would pall, but Carson's also a terrific reporter. No metaphor, when G recounts a TV nature show - but what imagery: Cheetah trips the gazelle. Lands on it. Eats it. Know your weapon says Sad. They drive on. Past cliffs and ice fog steaming down. Ponies in a circle with noses together and tails blown straight out horizontal to the wind. To read Carson is continually to be disoriented and reoriented, grabbed and dropped. It is not always to be moving forward, despite the velocity of individual pieces. This is hardly unusual in poetry - but this is book-length narrative, however zigzaggy. It's not always easy to care about these characters; detailed as they are, they remain types around whom description and metaphor are formed. Carson manufactures plenty of intensity in small moments of lyric stasis, but over all there's not much push. To say that may be merely to describe her intentions. Io jumps when she spots G in the valley below. He looks up to see her plummeting toward him at the velocity you would expect of a 400-pound object falling through space. . . . He shoots his wings to their fullest expanse and screams once as he leaves the ground. Like a dream, this disturbs without being comprehensible: what does it mean? how am I supposed to feel about it? But how stunning. And how queasy-making. Serious poetry readers like to be put off balance, feel their stomachs drop. "Red Doc>" invites confusion, and invites us to read for plot. There's a riot at the clinic, a volcano erupts, but nothing that happens seems particularly inevitable or, for that matter, interesting, except insofar as Carson's eccentric high jinks dress events up. "Red Doc>" might fail as a novel - did it want to succeed as a novel? - but it succeeds as linguistic confrontation. And "Red Doc>" succeeds at the last. The last few poem-strips are about G and his mother. Suddenly there's a poet behind the mask of G, a poet whose mother is a quandary to avoid and submit to. If this is nothing more than a fiction of my own creation, still it makes the book feel - finally - personal, necessary and important. Flying cows, Sad's eyes, a mother whose "bed is as / big as a speedboat and she / a handful of twigs under / the sheet." Read this book. You'll find it hard to forget. Daisy Fried's new book of poems is "Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 21, 2013]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Carson is one of the most famous poets writing in English; her many rabid fans await her new books with eager anticipation. A classicist by training, Carson has found, over a career spanning three decades and 14 books of poetry, prose, drama, and translation (often knitted together into unclassifiable collections), consistently new ways of reinventing the classical myths or of setting mythical material in a hip, jerky contemporary world. This new book is a sequel to the book that first made Carson famous, Autobiography of Red. It takes Geryon, the red demon-boy who starred in that book, ages him to adulthood, renames him "G," and sets him loose in a confusing, fast-paced contemporary world. A kind of novel in (mostly) prose poetry, this book follows G through familial, erotic, and political discoveries on an eventual road trip with a lover named "Sad." Throughout, Carson reveals a quirky wisdom, which feels as cool as it does true: "Time passes time does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes." (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
G, the winged, red, child monster Geryon, whose story was given a modern retelling in Carson's Autobiography of Red, is now grown up. His friend Sad But Great (usually called Sad) is emotionally damaged by war. Together with the prickly Ida, "filled with/ mood like a very tough/ experimental baby," they launch on a startling picaresque unlike anything one might have read or imagined one might want to read. As the book-length poem opens, G is living alone in a hut, tending a herd of musk oxen. Perhaps he finds comfort in the herd's steady animal energy, because "memory is exhausting" (though "To stand in time with your/ back to the future your/ face to the past what a/ relief"). Given the contradictions, it seems best to keep moving, and soon G and Sad are journeying from a glacier's "dirty ice" to an attempted robbery to a clinic where Sad is treated, with Ida chasing after them. VERDICT Narrow-gauge prose poems alternate with strung-together conversation and moody, archaic intervals from the "Wives of Brain," but the real inventiveness is the oddly engaging, oddly distancing story told in fragments that don't want to end in a moral. Not for conventional readers but essential reading for poetry sophisticates.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
