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. Her most recent book is Wrong Norma.
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...
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.
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...
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...
Celan came up the mountain to visit the philosopher. He came on a wooden cart and was surrounded by a snowstorm. He felt ashamed. Shame is unreasonable. The philosopher was unashamed. He kept whistling. Snow was blinding them both. In the Hütte (hut, cabin, refuge, shelter, small house built of readily available materials) there was only one chair, a hard chair....
Anne Carson reads her poem, ‘A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways’.
In a rare UK performance Canadian poet Anne Carson read from her recent verse novel Red Doc>, a sequel to her 1998 Autobiography of Red.
The pieces in Wrong Norma are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be found in the idea of wrongness, which appears not as a fact or a verdict but as a feeling.
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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