Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s collections of poetry include Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, Nox and The Beauty of the Husband, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her many translations of classical works include An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Antigone and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. Her H of H Playbook, inspired by Euripides’ Herakles, is being made into an opera.

Poem: ‘Ásta’s Song’

Anne Carson, 27 July 2023

‘Mengi’ event, Brooklyn, 12 May 2023 

she does a performance that involves screaming

more formally you might say vocal improv I would say screaming

what I think of it I’m not yet loosened up enough to say

they are quite pale the musicians mostly Icelanders mostly improv

who has trouble with improv, well, who does not

I don’t know if it’s good I don’t know...

I think I should go in and see her. Can I stand it. She is shaking. No doubt. I should go in. She’ll be pouring another glass. It stops the shaking. No doubt. She’ll be sitting in front of that stupid painting she likes, she’ll talk about going out to shovel the steps before it freezes, maybe she will go out, slip on the steps and kill herself, that will stop the shaking, no...

From The Blog
27 January 2023

To Stykkishólmur to report on the weather you go.

Have to borrow a big car, special tyres, four-wheel drive. You know how weather in Stykkishólmur can be complex. You lived there once in 2009.

Eked-out sunrise. You write this down in your notebook, wondering if eked is a word. Pink as a rinsed dishrag, you add, then cross it out.

What I Like about You, Baby

Anne Carson, 4 August 2022

ex-lover 1ex-lover 2

1 you smell damp, is it raining?2 nice and dry in here1 two hundred seats not even half full2 Japanese film week?1 funny how Americans dislike subtitles2 you said this one’s a film noir?1 what I like about you, baby, is you’re rock bottom2 and what I like about film noir is –1 no one ever reads a book, no one ever cleans their teeth, no one is ever happy...

On Snow

Anne Carson, 21 April 2022

One cold dark night​ there was a story about a knocking at the outer gate. Despite cries of Yes! Yes! Coming! someone still knocked and the snow that had piled on the gate was blown halfway up the door itself, with no meaning as to the blind knocking or the thick snow or why it did not stop. I knew I should be writing a straightforward story, or even a poem, but I didn’t. I should get...

Professor or Pinhead: Anne Carson

Stephanie Burt, 14 July 2011

Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet,...

Read more reviews

Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three...

Read more reviews

Tongue breaks: Sappho

Emily Wilson, 8 January 2004

Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the...

Read more reviews

I am going to end up talking about love, but let me start by talking about money. Money, as Marx tells us, is the enemy of mankind and social bonds. ‘If you suppose man to be man and his...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences