Glass, Irony and God

Rating:
Summary: The other "it" book
Review: Anne Carson and John D'Agata are changing the landscape of essay writing. Whether it's her classical twists on the American absurd or his poetic explorations of roadside attractions, they're the breath of fresh air the 21-century is waiting for. Here Anne Carson is at her best. It is the book to read for a primer to what's new and great in the essay world.

Rating:
Summary: THIS is the Anne Carson Book to Read
Review: Forget about all that Autobiography stuff, and definitely try to forget all the recent stuff this chick's been writing. Anne Carson is at her best in the first section of this book, "The Glass Essay."

Rating:
Summary: her best
Review: This book contains one traditional essay, a fascinating study of language and gender (classical Greece to Freud), and five poems which blur the line between essay and poetry. The net result is the exploration of very complex thoughts in a very readable form - a form that hides the complexity behind very concrete, common life images.

In "The Glass Essay" grief over a lost relationship, the relationship between the Bronte sisters, the relationship between mother-daughter, and the writings of Emily Bronte are explored in a seamless manner.

"The Truth About God" is a search for the meaning of God in our era. The opening stanza sets the tone for the exploration: "My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it." It draws from Beethoven's life, from Teresa of Avila, from the apophatic theology ...

"TV men" mixes Greek heroes and Gods with filming - meet Hector and Socrates in a new environment. "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide" explores personal relationships (or lack thereof) when language becomes a barrier not a bridge. "Book of Isaiah" explores the mindset behind the Biblical text of Isaiah.

The strength of this book is that the vast knowledge behind the writing is made accessible to the reader rather than being required of the reader. This is a book that makes the reader want to read more of the author's work.

Rating:
Summary: Innovative form
Review: This book contains one traditional essay, a fascinating study of language and gender (classical Greece to Freud), and five poems which blur the line between essay and poetry. The net result is the exploration of very complex thoughts in a very readable form - a form that hides the complexity behind very concrete, common life images.

In "The Glass Essay" grief over a lost relationship, the relationship between the Bronte sisters, the relationship between mother-daughter, and the writings of Emily Bronte are explored in a seamless manner.

"The Truth About God" is a search for the meaning of God in our era. The opening stanza sets the tone for the exploration: "My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it." It draws from Beethoven's life, from Teresa of Avila, from the apophatic theology ...

"TV men" mixes Greek heroes and Gods with filming - meet Hector and Socrates in a new environment. "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide" explores personal relationships (or lack thereof) when language becomes a barrier not a bridge. "Book of Isaiah" explores the mindset behind the Biblical text of Isaiah.

The strength of this book is that the vast knowledge behind the writing is made accessible to the reader rather than being required of the reader. This is a book that makes the reader want to read more of the author's work.

Rating:
Summary: The professor sets a high standard
Review: This is some darned fine and aggravating poetry. The Glass Essay is a kind of hybrid of verse and essay; poetry with a point to make. The last piece, The Gender of Sound, is an essay --but you're not the sort of reader who reads reviews at Amazon if you're the sort who'll make it all the way through that sucker. I was with her for "the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo" and could follow her assertion that Hemingway was afraid of Gertrude Stein the meat-eater because of her voice. Where I lost her, and bet you will too, though I admire and am jealous of those who won't, is when she veers into "lyric fragments of the archaic poet Alkaios" which she reproduces in the original language and explicates with words I am absolutely unfamiliar with. But here's the rub. Just because I can't follow where this Canadian classics professor's brain can go in an essay doesn't mean I can't read her poetry, slap the ground, say holy cow, and want to go out and be a better man because of it. The rigorous scholarship she shows off in the essay informs the poetry and prods along my reading of it. The Truth About God, TV Men, and The Fall of Rome are poetry nobody's written before.

Rating:
Summary: worth is for the first essay alone
Review: What makes this book worth it is the very first essay in the collection, The Glass Essay, a work that is written in verse and that is tinged with the kind of mix of immagination and scholarship that has made Carson's work so popular. By far, however, this is one of her best works. Certainly better than the journeys she has made into poetry exclusively recently. Read this essay before any of her other work and you will have an excellent primer for this evocative writer!

Rating:
Summary: A Grand Experiment
Review: While experimental verse often risks feeling contrived or convoluted, Anne Carson's ambitious voice builds on accomplishments of previous works such as "The Life of Towns"-always feeling genuine and purposeful, yielding moments of intense irony, rhythm, and blade-sharp line breaks facilitated by Carson's idiosyncratic punctuation.

Aside from grammatical and linguistic devices, though, another successful experiment is Carson's capacity for engaging in biography and autobiography simultaneously in "The Glass Essay," as Emily Bronte's life becomes a mirror for the speaker's own predicament and contributes an additional layer of complexity and pathos.

Where Emily Dickinson uses dashes to reveal the full power of a particular word or line, Carson resorts to an unusual frequency of periods, creating abrupt shifts of focus that help the poem encompass as much subject as possible within just a few sparse lines. In "The Glass Essay," she resorts to this device immediately and often:

She lives on a moor in the north.
She lives alone.
Spring opens like a blade there.

Already, in just three short lines of the 38-page poem's fourth stanza, we encounter loneliness, landscape and season, distinctly echoing past triumphs such as "The Life of Towns," as in "Town of Spring Once Again," for instance:

Rain hissed down the windows.
Longings from a great distance.
Reached us.

Despite the periods, the enjambment of these lines is obvious, and more startling. Drops of rain become "longings from a great distance" but, at the same time, the origin of these "longings" remains mysterious. From where are they "reaching" the speaker? The reader is left to imagine and savor.

It is in Carson's skill for weaving Emily Bronte's persona together with the speaker's, however, that "The Glass Essay's" abundant despair becomes most compelling. Like Bronte, whose storied alienation and seclusion comprise much of the poem's focus, the speaker identifies deeply with the moor's landscape. "My lonely life around me like a moor," she says, going on to describe the moor as "paralyzed with ice" in a moment of pathetic fallacy.

Similarly, just as Bronte is described as a "soul trapped in glass" and a "wacher" who "wached the poor core of the world," the speaker becomes just as imprisoned and secluded, obsessively noting the minutest observations as she gazes into "the curtainless morning" like someone under a life sentence. By poem's end, though, the speaker emerges from the malaise that Bronte only escapes through death. "I gave up watching," the speaker confesses, "I lived my life." Finally, in the speaker's own inability to endure the intense loneliness under which Bronte lived (and died), Emily Bronte's own life struggle becomes that much more palpable.