Men in the Off Hours FROM OUR EDITORS
Capturing the Spirit of the Age
Anne Carson has received the Pushcart Prize and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry; Michael Ondaatje has called her "the most exciting poet writing in English today." Many poets of this stature seem to exist in a rarefied atmosphere only accessible to the insular world of 21st-century poetry devotees, but Carson has a democratic touch that opens her work up to a much larger audience. For one thing, she experiments with other linguistic forms, including hybrids of poetry and prose. Her last book, Autobiography of Red, was a novel in verse, and her newest collection, Men in the Off Hours, continues in this vein, offering a range of forms, from brief, haiku-like lyrics to full-blown, copiously footnoted essays. But perhaps more importantly, Carson addresses and incorporates the themes and structures of modern image-based technology, particularly with her ingenious use of "telescript" motifs: Rather than hiding from this reality, Carson welcomes and explores the fact that pure language is more often than not used as directions for a "production" that will incorporate other media. In an age when poetry is increasingly seen as a marginalized art form that no longer speaks to the general public, this work is a welcome reminder that poetry is less about adhering to strict rules of verse (even modernist and postmodernist rules) than about capturing the spirit of an age, wherever it resides.
Much of Men in the Off Hours seems motivated by an urge to offer poetry that is still relevant, without ever seeming desperate in its attempts. In this era of rapid-fire televised images, Carson provides a sequence entitled "TV Men," a loosely connected group of poems that all share the conceit of a film or television production. We come across voice-overs by directors of photography, blocking directions, shooting scripts -- but the central characters of these imagined performances are cultural icons of the past: Artaud, Tolstoy, Thucydides, Virginia Woolf, even Lazarus. These tricks never seem silly, however, or too much of a stretch -- in fact, they beg the question, why aren't other serious writers addressing these now-universal themes of television and the tyranny of images in a way that's even half as clever?
Carson is anything but smoke and mirrors: along with the above-mentioned flights of fancy, Men in the Off Hours offers dozens of powerful, "traditional" poems full of insightful beauty. Early in the collection, "New Rule" begins with this scene-setting line: "A New Year's white morning of hard new ice." In only 20 lines, Carson offers a meditation on loss and making due, with this powerful climax:
The squirrel bounced down a branch
and caught a peg of tears.
The way to hold on is
afterwords
so
clear.
Even in this simple lyric, Carson's deliberate misspelling of "afterwords" asks us to step beyond the tools of her chosen trade to explore the underlying issues and emotions that can only be hinted at with words. And while she includes academic-seeming essays (including a 20-pager, with 59 footnotes, called "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity"), Carson experiments with that form as well: In the verse essay, "Essay on What I Think About Most," Carson discusses an ancient Spartan poet named Alkman and seems to be offering some thoughts on her own writing in the process. "There are three things that I like about Alkman's poem," she says. "First that it is small,/light/and more than perfectly economical." This quality applies to many of her briefer lyrics. "Second that it seems to suggest colors like pale green/without ever naming them." It's hard to separate the suggestive power of that line from a detached perspective on Carson's poetry, but that too rings true. And finally, "Third that it manages to put into play/some major metaphysical questions/(like Who made the world)/without overt analysis." It is exactly this quality that makes Carson such a pleasure to read: She's direct enough so you don't have to struggle to understand what she's getting at, but subtle enough so it doesn't hit you over the head.
Anne Carson is a poet who isn't afraid to confront the very forces that are always cited as threatening poetry's vitality: our increasingly image-based culture and its many new media, or even just prose itself. One might find that the most beautiful and poetic piece in Men in the Off Hours is the final prose essay, about her mother's death: "It grows dark as I write now, the clocks have been changed, night comes earlier -- gathering like a garment. I see my mother, as she would have been at this hour alone in her house, gazing out on the cold lawns and turned earth of evening, high bleak grass going down to the lake." Maybe it's time to put aside the restrictive definitions that separate poetry and its elitist trappings from the larger world of prose. Men in the Off Hours would make an excellent starting point.
—Jake Kreilkamp
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Following her widely acclaimed Autobiography of Red ("A spellbinding achievement" —Susan Sontag), a new collection of poetry and prose that displays Anne Carson's signature mixture of opposites—the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse.
In Men in the Off Hours, Carson reinvents figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon. She views the writings of Sappho, St. Augustine, and Catullus through a modern lens. She sets up startling juxtapositions (Lazarus among video paraphernalia; Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war). And in a final prose poem, she meditates on the recent death of her mother.
With its quiet, acute spirituality, its fearless wit and sensuality, and its joyful understanding that "the fact of the matter for humans is imperfection," Men in the Off Hours shows us "the most exciting poet writing in English today" (Michael Ondaatje) at her best.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Carson's demanding style has been among the decade's most intriguing: critics with little else in common look forward to her inimitable and argumentative poems. Carson made her last splash with the narrative poem Autobiography of Red. This follow-up volume of short poems incorporates a brace of unusual genres--quick verse-essays, epitaphs and epigrams, predictions and "oracles," pseudo-bibliographical "drafts" and "fragments," verse-portraits (the Biblical Lazarus, a circus "Flatman"), invented proverbs, and extremely free translations. (One of several amazing versions of Catullus begins "Before my holy stoning in the wet kisses and the smell of sperm/ I drove an ambulance for the Red Cross.") Like her previous work, these poems draw frequently on Carson's classical training (she teaches Greek and Latin at McGill University in Montreal). Her harsh, carved lines, clear closures and periphrases can sound like attempts to forge an English answer to Greek lyric. The opening "Epitaph: Zion" initiates readers into the sudden twists, astonishments and mysteries in the longer work to follow: the whole poem reads: "Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives/ Were fragile, the wind/ Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather/ Who drank a bowl of elsewhere." Potential keys to many poems reside in two brisk, scholarly prose essays at the beginning and near the end--"Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War" and "Dirt and Desire: Female Pollution in Antiquity." Woolf reappears in the poems as a principle of inner experience and subjective time, Thucydides as the opposing principle of linear time, narrative, action, event. Carson's other new works invoke, describe and quote Hokusai, Audobon, Tolstoy, Augustine, Edward Hopper, Akhmatova and Artaud; it is the measure of Carson's striking talent that the men and women in her lines sound, at base, always and only like her. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Library Journal
Canadian Carson roared onto the American poetry scene in 1998 with Autobiography of Red, a National Book Critics Circle nominee. Her new book, also an NBCC nominee, exhibits the same intellectual rigor, polished verse, and depth of knowledge of her previous efforts. Carson, a classics professor, makes bold references to everyone from Oedipus to Akhamatova, but the effect of these astute, gemlike little poems is less a history lesson than a challenging conversation in a sunlit garden. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Burt - The Village Voice Literary Supplement
Men in the Off Hours is
Carson's first book of short poems and
essays since Plainwater; it's also her best
book yet.
Calvin Bedient - The New York Times Book Review
There's good reason that Carson's reputation has
soared to a level equal to that of the half-dozen
most admired contemporary American poets.
She's tremendously gifted and, without lowering
standards, often writes in a middle range between
philosophy and lyricism, where many can find her.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Amazing—I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvelously disturbing.
— Alice Munro
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