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Title: Glass, Irony and God by Anne Carson, Guy Davenport ISBN: 0-8112-1302-1 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: October, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: worth is for the first essay alone
Comment: What makes this book worth it is the very first essay in the collection, The Glass Essay, a work that is written in verse and that is tinged with the kind of mix of immagination and scholarship that has made Carson's work so popular. By far, however, this is one of her best works. Certainly better than the journeys she has made into poetry exclusively recently. Read this essay before any of her other work and you will have an excellent primer for this evocative writer!
Rating: 5
Summary: Innovative form
Comment: This book contains one traditional essay, a fascinating study of language and gender (classical Greece to Freud), and five poems which blur the line between essay and poetry. The net result is the exploration of very complex thoughts in a very readable form - a form that hides the complexity behind very concrete, common life images.
In "The Glass Essay" grief over a lost relationship, the relationship between the Bronte sisters, the relationship between mother-daughter, and the writings of Emily Bronte are explored in a seamless manner.
"The Truth About God" is a search for the meaning of God in our era. The opening stanza sets the tone for the exploration: "My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it." It draws from Beethoven's life, from Teresa of Avila, from the apophatic theology ...
"TV men" mixes Greek heroes and Gods with filming - meet Hector and Socrates in a new environment. "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide" explores personal relationships (or lack thereof) when language becomes a barrier not a bridge. "Book of Isaiah" explores the mindset behind the Biblical text of Isaiah.
The strength of this book is that the vast knowledge behind the writing is made accessible to the reader rather than being required of the reader. This is a book that makes the reader want to read more of the author's work.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Grand Experiment
Comment: While experimental verse often risks feeling contrived or convoluted, Anne Carson's ambitious voice builds on accomplishments of previous works such as "The Life of Towns"-always feeling genuine and purposeful, yielding moments of intense irony, rhythm, and blade-sharp line breaks facilitated by Carson's idiosyncratic punctuation.
Aside from grammatical and linguistic devices, though, another successful experiment is Carson's capacity for engaging in biography and autobiography simultaneously in "The Glass Essay," as Emily Bronte's life becomes a mirror for the speaker's own predicament and contributes an additional layer of complexity and pathos.
Where Emily Dickinson uses dashes to reveal the full power of a particular word or line, Carson resorts to an unusual frequency of periods, creating abrupt shifts of focus that help the poem encompass as much subject as possible within just a few sparse lines. In "The Glass Essay," she resorts to this device immediately and often:
She lives on a moor in the north.
She lives alone.
Spring opens like a blade there.
Already, in just three short lines of the 38-page poem's fourth stanza, we encounter loneliness, landscape and season, distinctly echoing past triumphs such as "The Life of Towns," as in "Town of Spring Once Again," for instance:
Rain hissed down the windows.
Longings from a great distance.
Reached us.
Despite the periods, the enjambment of these lines is obvious, and more startling. Drops of rain become "longings from a great distance" but, at the same time, the origin of these "longings" remains mysterious. From where are they "reaching" the speaker? The reader is left to imagine and savor.
It is in Carson's skill for weaving Emily Bronte's persona together with the speaker's, however, that "The Glass Essay's" abundant despair becomes most compelling. Like Bronte, whose storied alienation and seclusion comprise much of the poem's focus, the speaker identifies deeply with the moor's landscape. "My lonely life around me like a moor," she says, going on to describe the moor as "paralyzed with ice" in a moment of pathetic fallacy.
Similarly, just as Bronte is described as a "soul trapped in glass" and a "wacher" who "wached the poor core of the world," the speaker becomes just as imprisoned and secluded, obsessively noting the minutest observations as she gazes into "the curtainless morning" like someone under a life sentence. By poem's end, though, the speaker emerges from the malaise that Bronte only escapes through death. "I gave up watching," the speaker confesses, "I lived my life." Finally, in the speaker's own inability to endure the intense loneliness under which Bronte lived (and died), Emily Bronte's own life struggle becomes that much more palpable.
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Title: Plainwater : Essays and Poetry by Anne Carson ISBN: 0375708421 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 28 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson ISBN: 1564781887 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: March, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Anne Carson ISBN: 037570129X Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 27 July, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Beauty of the Husband : A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos by Anne Carson ISBN: 0375707573 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: If Not, Winter : Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson, Sappho ISBN: 0375410678 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 27 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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