Anne Carson

I don’t know exactly when I first met the work of Anne Carson, though I do know this: the book was Plainwater and it was given to me by my friend Udo on one of his visits to Nova Scotia, possibly in 2000 or 2001. I am grateful to Udo for the thoughtfulness, timeliness, and rightness of the gift, one I am thinking of again tonight after my first reading of Nox.

Before I met Anne Carson’s work I had three heroes who provided some sort of reference point or benchmark for me. All three were male and each had the same first name; they were Robert Frank, Robert Zimmerman (aka Dylan), and Robert Creeley. This triumvirate of artists soon had to shift its centre of gravity (wherever that might have been) to accommodate the quirky, erudite, and consistently compelling presence of Anne Carson, and she has very ably held her own in the decade since.

What is it about Anne Carson?

There’s the series of pieces in Plainwater called Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother. You know, if you love swimming, something of that marginal world he explores, afloat between the earth and the sky; you know, if you pay attention to his/her words, something of the presence and absence of Anne Carson’s brother; and you know, if you know anything at all, something of the way she works language to make whatever is the thing she is making.

Then there are Short Talks, the small worlds they open up, the small worlds they cut into. You wonder where that strength, of mind, of language, of perception, of feeling, comes from and how the words carry it to you, knocking your socks off.

There was the long talk she gave at King’s on translation that I had to miss. Lorraine told me that she illustrated it with a slide show of artworks, tangential or peripheral, but always connected, always illuminating.

But there was the reading two days later at Saint Mary’s where she surprised me with her wry humour and didn’t surprise me with the strength of her quiet presence. She signed all the books I brought Respectfully AC 2002 under her name on the title pages. She used the pencil I had in my journal.

There’s The Glass Essay in Glass, Irony and God, on Bronte and on being bereft in Bronte country. A blurb from The Nation tells it right: “Anne Carson is a philosopher of heartbreak.”

There’s The Gender of Sound, that you just have to read yourself, so that you too can come to her closing questions: I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.

There’s this on language from God Stiff:

God gave an onomatopoeic quality to women’s language.
These eternally blundering sounds eternally
blundering down

into the real words of what they are
like feet dropped into bone shoes.
“Treachery” (she notices) sounds just like His zipper going down.

And there’s so much more, because I have dipped lightly into only two of her books, but it’s enough to show why she has joined my heroes and how she easily counterbalances the male presence of the others in this small pantheon.

So this afternoon when I called Chapters and found they still had one copy of Nox, my older son saw me grinning and said Pappy is happy! I was, and am, to have a copy of this work that moves me tonight just as I was first moved by the presence of her brother at the end of Plainwater. His is an absence I also feel.

If you want to get a quick taste of her presence and voice, check here or here.