Men in the Off Hours - Hardcover

Carson, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375408037 ISBN 13: 9780375408038

Publisher: Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

Yes, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds--and minor poets. The major ones tend to operate in a trough-and-peak pattern, producing a dozen lesser works for every masterpiece. Still, Anne Carson pushes this tendency to extremes, and nowhere more markedly than in Men in the Off Hours, which contains some of the best and worst lyrics of her entire career.

First, the good news: Nobody has written more acutely about perception--about the chaotic collision of our senses with the real world--since the glory days of Wallace Stevens. Not that Carson echoes the airborne rhetoric of her great predecessor. Her fractured, zigzagging lines deliberately avoid the kind of gravity that was his trademark, and she likes to deflect the grand manner by ratcheting her diction upward (into Delphic utterance) or downward (into baby talk, if the baby happens to be Gertrude Stein). Still, like Stevens, she makes us think about how we think. She dislikes any attempt to remove cognition from its rustling Heraclitean framework. No wonder she ends up scolding taxidermy freak John James Audubon, whose point-and-shoot portraiture rubs her the wrong way: "In the salons of Paris and Edinburgh // where he went to sell his new style / this Haitian-born Frenchman / lit himself // as a noble rustic American / wired in the cloudless poses of the Great Naturalist. / They loved him // for the 'frenzy and ecstasy' / of true American facts." We comprehend things only in flux and, as Carson explains in "Essay on What I Think About Most," by mistake:

...what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error,
the willful creation of error,
the deliberate break and complication of mistakes
out of which may arise
unexpectedness.

Now for the bad news: Men in the Off Hours includes too ample a serving of Carson's weaker, semiprecious work--short lyrics in which she bends over backwards for an antipoetic poetic effect (if such a thing is possible). "Epitaph: Europe" is precisely the kind of freeze-dried surrealism she should avoid. And the spitballs this classicist fires at television in a piece like "TV Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War" are truly puzzling. Why blame the tube for our cultural sins, particularly when the average NYPD Blue rerun contains more experiential fiber than most contemporary poetry? Still, Carson's blazing successes easily overshadow her failures. And those who have found her too recondite, too forbidding, need only take a look at the concluding poem, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." This elegy to the poet's mother is touching, emotionally direct, and completely original: an instant (to use a phrase Carson would probably loathe) classic. --James Marcus

From the Publisher

"Brilliant and irrepressible, Carson takes liberties with high irony and deep emotion."
-- Booklist

"Immediate, intimate, and astute...Read this book now, and you'll have the pleasure of knowing that you were present at the arrival of a truly great poet of the 21st century."
-- Time Out

"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...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...Striking."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Everything welcomes Carson, she welcomes everything. . . The most instantly penetrating of contemporary poets, she's a principle of vividness visited worldsharp upon the world. She goes at once to where the living is . . . There's good reason that Carson's reputation has soared to that of the half-dozen most admired contemporary American (sic.) poets. She's tremendously gifted and, without lowering standards, often writes in a middle range between philosophy and lyricism, where many can find her. At the same time, she has a great intellectual and emotional knowledge, a vast habitat, to every bit of which she brings powerful perception and a freshness as startling as a loud knock at the door."
--Calvin Bedient, New York Times Book Review
                                

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375408037
• ISBN 13: 9780375408038
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176