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“... 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 plays about the legacy of Atreus, one each by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as in her translations of four other plays by Euripides,* I kept hearing an invitation to ...”

“... 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, classical scholar, essayist and translator became suddenly prominent in North America; she had found readers in Britain as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T ...”

“... the sense that fell through us of untouchable wind, unknown effort – one black mane? Anne Carson Funny you should mention a crow. For years light … for years light eluded me or stayed only a short time … something … what was it … heavy in me … a weight I couldn’t put down … How will you let her go, the girl with the high ...”

“... There are numerous small literary quotations in Sparrows on the Stone – passages from Auden, Anne Carson, William Gass – but none of them are quite so peculiar as Marten’s own style, whether in prose or in polished Jesmonite.In an essay on the word ‘and’ in his Habitations of the Word, Gass writes: ‘To the logician, who is at least patient ...”

“... it produces a kind of constructive estrangement from words. Think William Gass, Lydia Davis or Anne Carson, and you won’t be too wrong. Now I feel like someone who thinks there’s a shower on the way, and then it rains for ten days straight. Williams is just full of alphabets. The first story is even called ‘The Alphabet’, and near its end ...”

“... from one claw. Both scholars and creative writers have made much of Sappho’s fragmentariness. Anne Carson’s new translations, with facing Greek text, make effective use of blank space and brackets to convey the feeling of a torn or burned scrap of papyrus. Carson loves the spaces almost as much as the words: she ...”

“... the silence associated with her own. In the film, Antigone is played with great fierceness by Anne Carson, whose own obsession with Sophocles led to a poem, ‘TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)’, which is incorporated in the spoken text. Oedipus is played by Stephen Dillane, who limps across blasted landscapes – Bodmin Moor, Wyoming, Yellowstone ...”

“... You can’t just carry over the words of a poem into a different language, across that space Anne Carson describes as ‘like no other’, nor can you just re-create the thinking or the experience in the poem. Both Proust and Valéry described writing itself as an act of translation: translation, equally, is an act of writing, and at its best can ...”

“... Mallo writes at one point, and gaps such as these allow the fragments to ‘drift’, as Anne Carson put it in ‘Merry Christmas for Hegel’, ‘in gentle and mutual redefinition of one another’. ‘The so-called obra fragmentada,’ Mallo has said, is ‘usually understood as a collage of more or less erratic ...”

“... That joke isn’t possible without earnest literary pilgrimages to mock. In Economy of the Unlost Anne Carson gives a persuasive account of the nexus between poets and death, and goes back not to Orpheus’ loss of Eurydice, or Sappho’s apocryphal leap off a cliff, but to the fifth-century Simonides of Keos, the first poet crass enough to write poetry ...”

“... Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History’ but ‘Interested in:/the psychology of lying/Anne Carson on the death of her brother/French writers admired by Proust/the poems of Catullus/translations from the Serbian.’ This is perhaps no more than an upmarket version of Liking things on Facebook, but that too, as advertisers understand, is ...”

“... do the work? Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt, Alice Munro, Jeanette Winterson, Anne Carson. Why am I even making this list? By the end of the book, I felt for Flaubert. ‘The humid element’, the ‘tears, chatter, breast-feeding … menses’, was too much for me, too. I was more comfortable in Part 1, where the ‘veil of ...”

“... literary reputation? In the Forties and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a delicious dream ...”