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A review by nostradamusbuddy
Glass, Irony and God by Anne Carson
4.0
"LIV. / You think I'm being melodramatic. / One awful conversation about waterpipes. / isn't the end of friendship. / Well, a stranger is someone who takes dread a little too seriously" (The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide).
"Something inside it reminds me of childhood-- / it is the light of the stalled time after lunch / when clocks tick / and hearts shut / and fathers leave to go back to work / and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering / something they will never tell. / You remember too much, / my mother said to me recently. / Why hold onto all that? And I said, / Where can I put it all down?" (The Glass Essay).
Anne Carson's grasp of the English language is impeccable. Her poems are not just poems, but full narratives and essays under the guise of poetry, in which she explores figures in Greek myth, literary men and women, Christianity, and more. Carson's genre-bending collection urges us to look closely at how we perceive not just literary studies, but studies in our own friendships, sexuality, mental health, travels, and religion. The two standout pieces in this collection are definitely (in my opinion) "The Glass Essay," a poem where Carson's speaker explores the similarities between herself and writer Emily Bronte, and "Gender and Sound," a meditation on the implications gender has on how we perceive certain sounds, and how these implications have contributed to issues of patriarchy and misogyny. Although each piece is linguistically complex (I found myself rereading certain parts three times over, and each time I thought it meant something different) by the end I found myself understanding and relating to the text without being able to say exactly why. Carson's language is intense, not shying away from the gory realities of our bodies or what we put them through. I would recommend to anyone who is interested in reading a poem that isn't really a poem.
"Something inside it reminds me of childhood-- / it is the light of the stalled time after lunch / when clocks tick / and hearts shut / and fathers leave to go back to work / and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering / something they will never tell. / You remember too much, / my mother said to me recently. / Why hold onto all that? And I said, / Where can I put it all down?" (The Glass Essay).
Anne Carson's grasp of the English language is impeccable. Her poems are not just poems, but full narratives and essays under the guise of poetry, in which she explores figures in Greek myth, literary men and women, Christianity, and more. Carson's genre-bending collection urges us to look closely at how we perceive not just literary studies, but studies in our own friendships, sexuality, mental health, travels, and religion. The two standout pieces in this collection are definitely (in my opinion) "The Glass Essay," a poem where Carson's speaker explores the similarities between herself and writer Emily Bronte, and "Gender and Sound," a meditation on the implications gender has on how we perceive certain sounds, and how these implications have contributed to issues of patriarchy and misogyny. Although each piece is linguistically complex (I found myself rereading certain parts three times over, and each time I thought it meant something different) by the end I found myself understanding and relating to the text without being able to say exactly why. Carson's language is intense, not shying away from the gory realities of our bodies or what we put them through. I would recommend to anyone who is interested in reading a poem that isn't really a poem.