Anne Carson has a history of doing unpredictable and

genre-crossing things. A classical scholar who came late to

poetry, she rose, in the 90s and 00s, quickly and
deservedly, to prominence. Many readers (including me)
first knew her through The Glass Essay, a 38-page
multipart lyric narrative in 1995s Glass, Irony and God.
The poem is an inspired mash-up: a confessional-style I
recounts a breakup with a lover and a visit to an aged
mother while considering the life and writings of Emily
Bront and reporting on her surrealist visions of nudes.
The yoking of disparates, the old and the new, continues to
be a Carson strategy. Shes generally claimed by the poetry
world, but her books often contain swaths of lyric, critical
or essayistic prose, as well as translation, dramatic
dialogue and visual art. Many toil in the interstices of
genre; Carsons palatable, popular, sophisticated and whocares approach may have done the most and best work in
the last two decades to stop people worrying so much
about whats poetry and whats not. At her best, shes
among our most exciting poets. At her less-than-best shes
reliably ingenious, full of charisma and surprise. Lesser
poets who behave more predictably and risk less are easier
to praise and not as important.
Enlarge This Image

Jeff Brown

Anne Carson

RED DOC
By Anne Carson
167 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

Related

The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson (March 17, 2013)

Each new Carson project comes with new parameters. Last

year she published Antigonick, a handwritten, illustrated
retelling of the Sophocles classic. Before that was Nox, a
mass-reproduction of a handmade accordion-pleated artbook-in-a-box that Carson created in memory of her
brother, the centerpiece of which was a translation and
word-by-word interrogation of a Catullus poem. I think
The Glass Essay is still her best work; others would argue
for Autobiography of Red, a verse-novel that reimagines
the 10th labor of Herakles killing the red-winged
monster Geryon and stealing his herd of red cattle as
suggested by fragments from the ancient Greek poet
Stesichorus. In Autobiography, Carson imagines Geryon
as a shy, damaged, artistic teenager with wings who has a
doomed love affair with Herakles, a charismatic, selfish
rebel. Autobiography is whimsical, dark, interestingly

creepy and moving. It seems to me though many

readers disagree to be created out of willed obsession.
Geryon and Herakles reunite in Red Doc>, middle-aged.
Geryon is now G, still a cattle-herder (of sorts) if not much
of an artist, though he reads Proust and Daniil Kharms,
the Russian Soviet-era surrealist-absurdist. Herakles is
now called Sad But Great Sad, for short. Sad is a
traumatized veteran of a recent war. This adds a welcome
political dimension rarely seen elsewhere in Carsons
work. G and Sad take a road trip, ending up at a strange
clinic in an icy northland. A handful of other characters
derive nominally from Greek mythology. Hermes is a
mysterious man in a silver tuxedo who shows up every
now and then to guide them. Io the nymph turned into a
cow by Zeus, then maddened by Heras gadfly is the
loveliest member of Gs herd, a sexy musk ox:
She is a beast
constructed for smooth
striding. Now long pelvic
muscles organize her and
the vast loosejointed
shoulders glide forward
into movement.
Carson has, over the years, moved closer to bizarreness for
the sake of bizarreness but she still pulls it off, mainly
because the impulse behind it is mischief. Can I get away
with this? she seems to ask. And she does because its
fun. Shes having fun.

Heres what else she gets away with: Most of the poems in
Red Doc> are delivered in narrow strips of type, justified
at both margins like newspaper columns. Its a format that
counterintuitively speeds you down the page, as if creating
a chute for language. It also constricts in ways that put
useful pressure on the poems wild music and wilder state
of mind. Carson remains a master of idiosyncratic figures,
delivering metaphor and simile casually and suddenly,
while keeping her language idiomatically oddball.
Metaphors slide out of clipped fragments, torque
themselves from sentences pell-mell and complex. One
poem describes the landscape G and Sad drive through:
CROWS AS BIG as barns
rave overhead. Still
driving north. Night is a
slit all day is white.
Panels of torn planet loom
and line up one behind the
other to the far edge of
what eyes can see.
Or: Sad loves driving into this emptiness and his eyes are
bluer than holes in blue. Thats breathtaking, filling Sads
eyes with sky and absence, maybe blindness, and
melancholy. A steady diet of this would pall, but Carsons
also a terrific reporter. No metaphor, when G recounts a
TV nature show but what imagery:
Cheetah trips the gazelle.
Lands on it. Eats it.
Know your weapon says

Sad. They drive on. Past

cliffs and ice fog steaming
down. Ponies in a circle
with noses together and
tails blown straight out
horizontal to the wind.
To read Carson is continually to be disoriented and
reoriented, grabbed and dropped. It is not always to be
moving forward, despite the velocity of individual pieces.
This is hardly unusual in poetry but this is book-length
narrative, however zigzaggy. Its not always easy to care
about these characters; detailed as they are, they remain
types around whom description and metaphor are formed.
Carson manufactures plenty of intensity in small moments
of lyric stasis, but over all theres not much push. To say
that may be merely to describe her intentions.
Io jumps when she spots G in the valley below. He looks
up to see her
plummeting toward him
at the velocity you would
expect of a 400-pound
object falling through
space. . . .
He shoots his wings to
their fullest expanse and
screams once as he leaves
the ground.
Like a dream, this disturbs without being comprehensible:
what does it mean? how am I supposed to feel about it?

But how stunning. And how queasy-making. Serious

poetry readers like to be put off balance, feel their
stomachs drop. Red Doc> invites confusion, and invites
us to read for plot. Theres a riot at the clinic, a volcano
erupts, but nothing that happens seems particularly
inevitable or, for that matter, interesting, except insofar as
Carsons eccentric high jinks dress events up. Red Doc>
might fail as a novel did it want to succeed as a novel?
but it succeeds as linguistic confrontation.
And Red Doc> succeeds at the last. The last few poemstrips are about G and his mother. Suddenly theres a poet
behind the mask of G, a poet whose mother is a quandary
to avoid and submit to. If this is nothing more than a
fiction of my own creation, still it makes the book feel
finally personal, necessary and important. Flying cows,
Sads eyes, a mother whose bed is as / big as a speedboat
and she / a handful of twigs under / the sheet. Read this
book. Youll find it hard to forget.
Daisy Frieds new book of poems is Womens Poetry:
Poems and Advice.