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. She won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Highlights of Colonialism is due in 2027.
It was hidden in her and it gave Kant pleasure. L’Eclisse begins with a wind blowing Monica Vitti’s hair. She is inside a room.
Kant’s was a partly negative pleasure. Where is that wind from?
Kant took pleasure in what he called Thing In Itself. She is prowling the room with her eyes down, observed deeply by a man in an armchair.
Thing In Itself was unattainable,...
I don’t understand your faces, I don’t understand them. At night I stand at the back of the theatre. I watch you suck in sex, death, devastation, hour after hour in a weird kind of unresisting infant heat, then for no reason you cool, flicker out. I guess for no reason is an arrogant thing to say. For no reason I can name is what I mean. It was a few years ago now I gave you a...
The palace guards, the palace guards telephoned to ask for shards. I sent out the hard dogs.
Dark swallow.
It is no simple red, he said. Each thread spun from a different reason for marrying.
Dark swallow.
This sparkle of anyone, all too soon. All too, all too soon flaming.
Dark swallow.
Claiming to have no word for...
I want everything. Everything is a naked thought that strikes.
A foghorn sounding through fog makes the fog seem to be everything. Quail eggs eaten from the hand in fog make everything aphrodisiac.
My husband shrugs when I say so, my husband shrugs at everything. The lakes where his factory has poisoned everything are as beautiful as Brueghel.
I keep my shop, in order that I may sell...
Do you hear sighing. Do you wake amid a sigh. Radio sighs AM, FM. Shortwave sighs crackle in from the...
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...
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.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.