Reviews
"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 inDecreationare 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.Decreationmay be her loneliest booka 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 moretruer, more luminous, and also more transient. Carson moves from form to formpoetry, essay, screenplayand 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 spacebecause the words now contain the world that once existed around themthat 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 pow, "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 immensespace-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 Ant, "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 booka 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 moretruer, more luminous, and also more transient. Carson moves from form to formpoetry, essay, screenplayand 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 spacebecause the words now contain the world that once existed around themthat 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, "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 booka 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 moretruer, more luminous, and also more transient. Carson moves from form to formpoetry, essay, screenplayand 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 spacebecause the words now contain the world that once existed around themthat 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 Readerpopulated with such icons as Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Porete, and Michelangelo Antonioniand 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 examplesthis slide show of her iconsto 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." Mark Rudman, BookForum "For the past two decades, Canadian classics professor and
