purchased in memory of brother David ( )

While I'm a great fan of Carson's work generally (I've been running an Anne Carson reading group in Bath the last few years), this was a rare experience for me in that I read most of the book in a single sitting. This is a powerful exploration of mourning/grief/loss employing Carson's familiar approach of montage/juxtaposition of her classical knowledge with her brother's death, as a scrapbook of sorts. A powerful, innovative work. ( )

To call Anne Carson’s staggering Nox a book of poetry is not quite accurate, for both its physical and psychic dimensions transcend traditional taxonomies of genre. Nox is many things: an artist’s book, a journal, a collage, an elegy, a meditation on grief, and a souvenir, in the literal sense. It is a powerful statement of personal loss couched in a language of classical rigor, a spiritual exorcism given artifactual manifestation.

To start with Nox’s physical attributes: the book is a careful facsimile of a document the grief-stricken Carson assembled on the occasion of her estranged brother’s death. As such, it is essentially a replica of a scrapbook, containing pasted-in snippets of letters, photos, stained scraps of typing, lexical entries, a translation, and a smattering of jagged, abstract drawings; in the words of Joyelle McSweeney, “a {poetic} model based on an attractively varied set of transhistorical and cross-disciplinary examples.” It has been printed not as a traditional codex but as one uninterrupted accordion-style folding document, which in turn has been housed in a handsome if slightly forbidding case. Not your average book of word-slinging, to be sure.

All of this armature—and hats off to New Directions for a very pleasingly designed and printed volume indeed—would be peripheral, even self-indulgent, if the book’s unusual format was not mirrored by the strange beauty and emotional intensity of it contents. As glimpses of Carson’s relation with her troubled brother begin to surface through the textual and graphical chaos, the loss gradually accumulates a fatalistic inevitability worthy of Carson’s classical models. Carson’s brother, his life and his death both, were mysteries to Carson, and they remain mysteries to the reader, which is in part the source of their evocative and haunting appeal.

At first perusal Nox strikes the reader as capricious and disorienting, but as one progresses through the trajectory of Carson’s mourning some structural elements begin to recur and thus to emerge. The first of these is her use of lexical entries, as from a Latin dictionary, both as motif and as explicit manifestation of her fundamentally classicist, in the original sense of the word, outlook. For this reader, it was a revelation to find with what incantatory, onrushing velocity a lexical entry reads:

fortuna: the more or less personified agency supposed to direct events, Fortune…; ill-starred; the way in which events fall out, chance, hazard; a favorable occasion; what befalls or is destined to befall, one’s fate; (applied to persons whose destiny is bound up with one’s own); prosperity, good fortune; unfortunate circumstances, bad luck; social position, rank, station; greatness; wealth, property, fortune.

This particular entry is typical of the whole in that it is subtly but inescapably apposite to the death of Carson’s brother, whose life was “ill-starred” and “bound up with” Carson’s “own” indeed. Through repetition, both contextual and rhythmic, all of the lexical entries come to take on this strange, elegiac undertone.

The book’s second textual variant consists of short blocks of prose detailing the gradual disappearance of her brother: “All the years and time that had passed over him came streaming into me, all that history.” These sequences, numbered as neatly as examples in a grammar textbook, are harrowing in the disjunction between their tragic implications and their matter-of-fact tone. Commentators have frequently noted the unadorned nature of Carson’s work—it is often elastic, to put it mildly, in meter and line—and these passages attest to this plainness of approach. “I guess it never ends,” Carson writes, ostensibly of her attempts to make sense of a Catullan ode. “A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.”

In contrast to these fairly straightforward entries stand fragments of verse (“I love the old questions”, “I am curious about the season of coldness you have there”) that dot the manuscript like snatches of a half-remembered poem or an overheard conversation. These phrases, elliptical, dreamlike, have the power to evoke Carson’s loss by indirection, partly in counterpoint to the prose segments, but also by their function as captions to the fourth and most dominant structural facet of Nox, which is its searing graphical elements. The pages contain many blurry, sepia-toned snapshots and snippets of typed or scrawled letters, often sliced into fanned-out ribbons, as if the collagist were deranged by grief. These last visuals prove in some ways to be the most jarring; there is something violent and desperate about the way they are splattered across the page.

The cumulatie effect of this multimedia assault is dazzling. The expression of grief that Carson delineates creeps up on the reader, its effect being all the more vivid for its subtlety and slow accretion. The ultimate source of Nox’s power is Carson’s deeply classical aesthetic, as she seeks to express a very modern—actually rather sordid and commonplace—loss in a way that is steeped in the alien sensibility of an ancient culture, what Sainte-Beuve referred to as “the vast living expression of a whole epoch and a semi-barbarous civilization.” This is a very unusual position from which to attack the craft; as a prosodic tactic it seems, to this reader, quite possibly unique. Carson’s poetic voice genuinely has more in common with the ancient poets of Rome than it does with her twentieth-century peers: although there are some very private and intensely personal emotions portrayed, one would never think to describe Carson’s poetry as “confessional” in the same way as Lowell or Plath. Even the towering elegies of Shelley and Tennyson, by comparison, seem a mite… soggy, when contrasted with the radical austerity of Carson’s reflections. All told Nox is a singular achievement, and if its strategies are a bit opaque, it nevertheless stands as an affecting document and the product of an original and fertile mind working in a highly distinctive vein. From Zoland Poetry Review online, Winter 2010. ( )

Visually stunning. I had the same problem I always have with Anne Carson, which is that I think her brain operates so much differently than mine does that I don't quite get everything she is saying. Still quite moving and lovely. I just feel that if I were a different sort of person I might have really adored this book, and I didn't quite. ( )

I wasn't sure whether I was doing the wrong thing or the right thing reading this all in one go. On the one hand I felt I should have been savouring and processing the definitions/translations of each Latin word and the connections made between said word and Carson's personal reflections. On the other hand the book folds out as one long piece, and although it's a translation and a fragmentary elegy and many other things besides, it is also a poem, and not an unreasonable amount to consume in one go.

It's hard to imagine the death of a sibling, but almost equally hard for me to understand the distance between Carson and her brother. And then how to overcome that distance, how to grieve someone who is close to you and yet so far from you, it's so fundamentally dissimilar from my own life and relationships that I was reading this like I was learning the answer to a mystery, or like I was slowly putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that I have no picture-reference for.

I'm so curious to read some of Anne Carson's translations of Greek plays. I keep seeing fragments and she seems to have a real genius for translation. ( )