Glass, Irony and God

by Anne Carson, Guy Davenport (Introduction)

Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style in Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Brontë sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Classics, Canada, Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.

Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘I felt as if the sky was torn off my life.’

The best books feel like companionship. Not simply because you carry them around to read, or hold in your hand like a talisman, but because they live inside your thoughts, engage your mind and heart, and color your days in their unique rays of light. In the opening work in her extraordinary Glass, Irony, and God, Anne Carson describes ‘three silent women at the kitchen table’: her mother, herself, and Emily Brontë who is practically a physical presence as she so occupies the speaker’s thoughts while rereading Wuthering Heights. Reading Glass, Irony, and God felt much the same and Anne Carson has been at all the tables or riding shotgun with me since the moment I cracked the cover. It is a text that engages with you as much as you engage with it. If there was a version of spinning straw into gold for writers, it would be Anne Carson though she won’t ask you for your firstborn—she’ll just steal your heart and mind as ‘goblins, devils and death stream behind me,’ regardless if you guess her name. And you’ll be better for it. Across intensely beautiful poems like The Glass Essay—more like an essay driving you to experience the sublime—poems on God, a witty retelling of the prophet Isaiah, Greek figures as TV men and an essay on gendering sound as patriarchal oppression, Anne Carson delivers clever wit and brilliant insights that left me awestruck. It is a book difficult to encapsulate but one that shines with a radiance of intellect and emotion to flood the heart and mind in its glory.

‘You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?’

Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God is a book shelved under poetry for lack of a better category. It is poetry, to be clear, but yet somehow it feels like something wholly unique unto itself. Though this is also likely due to Carson tending to not consider herself a writer but a maker, something more akin to a craftsman. As she said in a 2016 interview:

‘Making a poem is making an object. I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language. It was another way to think of a book, an object that is as visually real as it is textually real.’

It is how she comes to create original works such as the accordion fold-out book in a box, Nox, or Float with loose chapbooks like flotsam in a clear case. Glass, Irony, and God, first published in 1992 has become a touchstone for Carson’s works with The Glass Essay, a near 40 page poem that is just a much an essay on Brontë as it is the most strikingly poignant break-up poem I’ve ever encountered (you can read it in full HERE). ‘It is as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass,’ Carson writes, and this image permeates much of the collection with each section being like a museum of ideas frozen into words to capture their perfection as if behind glass of an exhibit. In the section The Truth About God, Carson describes God watching creation ‘inside the case // which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank /God could see the machinery humming / and He watched the hum,’ further instilling this idea of life behind glass ‘because the outer walls of God are glass.’ Author David Markson once described Wuthering Heights, the novel central to The Glass Essay as being mostly about people ‘continually looking in and out of windows’ and across this collection Carson looks in and out of windows of the self, of love, of history and each other through her prose, ushering us over to peer alongside with her.

‘Why be unstrung and pounded flat and pine away
Imagining someone vast to whom I may vent the swell of my soul.’

I’ve read The Glass Essay half a dozen times already and I’ll read it a dozen more as it is sensationally good. We find the speaker visiting her mother who lives on the moors—doubly on the moors visiting them through Bronte’s novel as well—after finding her life unmoored when her lover abandons her. That his name was Law is linguistically great as we now see her in a state of being Lawless as if it is synonymous with loveless. As if love is a state of governance. ‘Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying. / I took this to be more a wish than a thought // and changed the subject,’ she writes. Unmoored on the moors, Lawless and without love, and to top it all off her father is fading into dementia and no longer remembers her or her mother. But in comes the words and biographical reflections of Emily Brontë and it becomes a brilliant journey of self-discovery. My heart leapt at the familiarity of a work of art or diving down a rabbit hole of obsessing over an artist becoming both a balm and a bastion against woes.

‘To see the love between Law and me
turn into two animals gnawing and craving through one another
towards some other hunger was terrible.

Perhaps this is what people mean by original sin, I thought.’

Juxtaposing reflections on Brontë seeking her own freedom—‘liberty means different things to different people’—with her visions of “The Nudes” which she comes to understand as ‘naked glimpses of my soul,’ the poem becomes an incredible outpouring of self-reflection and observation of her former love ‘like a glass slide under a drop of blood.’ It is emotionally stirring, full of pain and Carson admits ‘I am interested in anger.’ But a moment I found to really speak to me was the way Carson looks at the interplay between the ache and passage of time:

‘Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape…’

I really love this imagery of time playing in layers over each other. In her book Eros the Bittersweet, Carson discusses how desire and strong emotion can shift time as ‘the ‘now’ of desire is a shaft sunk into time and emerging onto timelessness,’ bending time or doubling back over. I think of that Leonard Cohen song where he asks ‘is it still raining back in November?’ as if the past is accessible due to the gravitational pull of desire. A doubling is a big element here and in Carson’s ideas on myth in general which she discusses in The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos:

‘All myth is an enriched pattern,
a two-faced proposition,
allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another,
to lead a double life’

There is the doubling of the moors, the doubling of time, the doubling of the speaker and Brontë (‘my main fear,’ she confesses, is ‘I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë’) but also the double between Brontë and the concept of “thou,” which she explores in depth. ‘For someone hooked up to Thou, / the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence,’ and she looks at Emily as the “whacher” in conversation between I and thou (note the poem begins with “I” marked like both a roman numeral for part 1 and I for the self). It is, eventually, a rather redemptive poem, something that springs into your heart and makes it swell in the beauty of the prose, the sort of pain that feels like purification.

‘I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.

It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,
but as I came closer
I saw it was a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind

was cleansing the bones.’

Such a purification is also part of the section of Isaiah poems. Carson’s retelling of the Biblical story of the prophet—’a man who believed he was a nation’—confronts us with ideas of transcendence, prophecy and spiritual pain. Carson includes many images of purification (God ‘washed Isaiah’s hair in fire’) and rebirth from the destruction.

‘There is a kind of pressure in humans to take whatever is most beloved by them
and smash it.

Religion calls the pressure piety and the smashed thing a sacrifice to God.

Prophets question these names.

What is an idol?

An idol is a useless sacrifice, said Isaiah’

As in the series of poems on god in which Carson writes ‘My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it,’ the Isaiah works look at the frustrated relationship between humans and the idea of the divine. Especially when questions around religion make us consider a question of essence or symbolism. ‘Our life is a camera obscura,’ Isaiah preaches, ‘you can hold up anything you like in front of that pinhole… and worship it on the opposite wall.’ Similarly, Carson looks at the way television can become a kind of alter all to itself in the section TV Men which has playful investigations of characters from Greek myth. Her segment on Hektor—’Wrong people look good on TV, they are so obviously / a soul divided’—has me guessing Carson was probably not into that 2004 Troy film.

‘I study your sleeping for / at the bottom of the pool / like a house I could return to.’

I was rather charmed by Carson’s Fall of Rome section in which she juxtaposes the collapse of the Roman Empire with her own sense of estrangement while visiting Rome. ‘A stranger is someone desperate for conversation,’ she writes, seeking to assuage her alienation, for someone to ‘open // a day // to a stranger, / who has no day / of his own.’ Yet all around in life we see ruin and learn this, too, is natural. And likely inevitable.

‘What is the holiness of empire?
It is to know collapse.

Everything can collapse.
Houses, bodies
And enemies

collapse
When their rhythm becomes
Deranged.’

Though perhaps after the initial section my favorite is Carson’s concluding essay, The Gender of Sound. Carson looks at the way sounds, particularly voices, have been gendered to relegate “feminine” voice and sound as a negative.

‘Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.’

It is a wonderfully researched piece looking across human history such as Aristotle writing that ‘the high-pitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices’ or Ernest Hemingway’s criticisms of Gertrude Stein’s voice in A Moveable Feast. She examines how sounds denoted as “feminine” is socially couched in ideas that ‘characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control.’ It’s like a sound check for patriarchy.

‘This soul trapped in glass,
Which is her true creation.’

There is a thematic thread on the ideas of self-control or not fitting into a mold. The Glass Essay examines Brontë, who’s work is ‘not at all like the poetry women generally write’ and that ‘there are many ways of being held prisoner’—especially under the expectations of men. The Laws in life. Aristotle’s gendering of sound implies that women lack a sense of self-control which begins to point towards the whole concept of “hysteria”, one of the most commonly diagnosed disorders in the 18th and 19th centuries for women. A disorder that was simply a way to silence women or shut them away under claims of being overly emotional, ‘as if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women’ (Glass Essay). ‘It is a fundamental assumption of these gender stereotypes that a…man’s proper civic responsibility towards woman is to control her sound for her insofar as she cannot control herself,’ Carson critiques, and it is why the self-introspection, the embracing oneself as Nude and muse is a path away from being under Law. She asks us to look to literature, arts, history to find another way.

‘I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another essence than self.’

A breathtaking work of originality, wit, and insight, Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God is one of my new favorite possessions. This book consumed me for days, sat with me at all my tables, and still speaks in my thoughts wherever I go. Carson is a quirky genius and while I’ve enjoyed exploring her work in the past, now I want to read everything she has ever done with a newly intensified desire. What a creator, what a work, what an amazing book.

5/5

‘Who in a nightmare
can help himself?’

[Helga · Rating 4 out of 5]

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that?
And I said,
Where do I put it down?

Written in free verse, Anne Carson’s poems revolve around the themes of love, God, yearning, anguish and acceptance. Her writing for some reason reminds me of Annie Ernaux’. The reason could be the too honest and sarcastic style of the two women.

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.

[Allison Goldstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes a book find you at exactly the right moment. I was in college and had a very limited knowledge of comtemporary (still living and writing) writers. I was chalk full of PLath and Sexton and Lowell and Whitman and then through a small series of events this book entered my life and I don't think anything I have ever written has been the same since.

There aren't a lot of words I can write that will do the book justice, but I will say on the record that I have yet to find more than a tiny handful of poems about God that are as moving, interesting, and resounding as these. Her essays, her poems, all sublime, all searching and weaving personal history with Greek Legend, the search for ourselves in our language, in our civilizations. I return to this book probably every few months and just flip to a random page and end up reading it for hours. There are a few perfect things in this world and sometimes they show up in the form of a book, Leaves Of Grass, A Hundred Years of Solitude, and in my opinion 2 books by Anne Carson- this one and Autobiography of Red.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

She whached the bars of time, which broke.
She whached the poor core of the world,
wide open. ‘The Glass Essay’

Flesh in after-glow math, reading without the lights. Her mother puts their things in the kitchen with the groceries. They parallel lapping, buzzing and caged birds the talk. I don’t know. I see the mother in flickering tv from before. Father/husband in hospital and doesn’t know who he is. The daughter time travels because an affair is over. Anger wakes up mornings. Emily Bronte, the whacher. Emily is the name of the house. Cleaning her carpets, she knew no pity. Small world, what was her concentration to prison? I was moved by her Emily questions when they were Emily. I was repulsed when they were fire for dead love affair confirmation. When was Emily first cold, when did the past become the reason for a time traveller. Caught in own bird’s-eye, Emily.

Is it a vocation of anger?
Why construe silence
as the Real Presence?

When the lover swerves to the wild in nude visions she believes there is no where else to go. I’m torn. I want no part of her therapist or word altars. Wildness like a thorn in a paw and a cry. Did Emily believe young. She believes now in nude women with thorns in the third-eye. You can’t go where you will, out run cold. How does Emily live in her house where Silence is her Thou. Is that where she is now?

I gave Charlotte the finger in my heart when she said that Emily didn't understand what she created. Did she have to name it? I had a depressing afternoon of googling Charlotte and her sisters the day I read this. I'm sad that Charlotte acted to keep Anne from readers. Charlotte had been my household name. I remember her a lot when being my own best friend is hard. Sometimes I think I'm gonna reread Jane Eyre for reinforcements.



Some people have to fight every moment of their lives
which God has lined with a burning animal-
I think because
God wants that animal kept alive.
‘Teresa of God’

snow shifts and settles on God.
On God’s bouquet.
The trees are white nerve nets.
‘God’s Bouquet of Undying Love’

God’s zipper, their knees. His word their words. I liked the “God” section best when thinking what it would be like with the animal. When they see his face why do some see the right face in the impressionistic painting and another the wrong side of the bed? I’ve no wish for proof or my own. If I could see their signs and know why Emily took her silence…. Something in the family.

Wrong people look good on TV, they are so obviously
a soul divided
‘TV Men: Hektor’

a whole darkness swung against the kind of sleep we
know,
the stumbled-into sleep of lanterns clipped on for a tour of the mine.
TV Men: The Sleeper

Roaches wouldn’t hide from the tv light.

There are laws against vice.
But the shock stays with you.
‘TV Men: Sappho’

TV is another altar to be alone. In conceptuals, when other people are watching. Not up close, to fall asleep to. Rot your rot. Silence/God/Thou/Eyes/Unbelief in humanity circles.

Your peace as an evangelist to me.
Your transformations unknown.
I study your sleeping form
at the bottom of the pool
like a house I could return to,
‘TV Men: The Sleeper’

I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.
'The Gender of Sound'

The ancient Greeks must have invented the are you not entertained box. Probably was their idea to hire those dialect coaches to turn out Danny Kaye's leading ladies. Can't tell them apart. God "the man" society all the way down. I think there is another essence.... I'm just wary it like those written silence things....

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Who in a nightmare
can help himself? (84)

[Aaron Anstett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even better than I remember, and I hope I reread it sooner next time.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is very cold
walking into the long scraped April wind.
At this time of the year there is no sunset
just some movements inside the light and then as sinking away.

These are meditations on mercy and the feminine. Issues of the divine struggle for capitalization, imploring Plato to find them as Form. This collection was powerful and I suspect if I had read it earlier in life it would have been devastating. It is as easily at home on the moors with Emily Brontë as it is wandering the Eternal City pondering the distances between tongues, between men and women. I was also mesmerized by Carson's gloss on Artaud.

Guy Davenport in his introduction is apt in his praise: Carson is a Poet, she's a classicist and always a philosopher. I wasn't familiar with her interest in volcanoes, although in light of her digressions on Hemingway against Stein that appears most fitting, though never appropriate.

[Liam O'Leary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video Review

I wish more people would read Anne Carson.

This is one of Anne Carson's earliest collections (in the UK), it's called Glass, Irony, and God in the US. The Glass Essay accounts for half of this book (Short Talks is at the end, with some smaller works in between). The Glass Essay is going to be in my all-time favourite poems for a very long time, I prefer it even to Nox and Autobiography of Red.

[Troy · Rating 4 out of 5]

All talk about God generally bores the hell out of me. It's like listening to bros talk about sports. I don't get it; I don't get the importance; I don't understand the bonding and meaning that sports/God provides. So all the God stuff in this book didn't do much for me (and that includes Carson's frequent mention of soul etc., even if it's predicated with a certain amount of skepticism, it reminds me of my current arty male friends who are secret sports fans – they preface sports talk with an ironic distance, which is fake, facile, and unnecessary). But despite all of that, "Book of Isaiah" is a knock out. It captures the rough-hewn brutality I remember in the earlier parts of the Torah/Old Testament: with God as a petulant child, constantly arguing with his favorites, and losing arguments! Carson's poem "Book of Isaiah" is great in its fear and dependency and resonates as a gender-bending hellish relationship based in power (God's and Isaiah's), responsibility (Isaiah's), and the fear of abandonment (God's). It's more than that, and it's filled with stunning lines, some prosaic and simple that still knocked me out, like

"Everything can collapse.
Houses, bodies
and enemies

collapse
when their rhythm becomes
deranged."

Or quick descriptors, like

"and she has got her smile up
as far as the mouth"

which I've seen and I've done and I remember telling myself while I'm doing it, "without the eyes crinkled, they'll know I'm faking it—you have to feel it; feel it; crinkle those eyes!"

And then filled with constant long complex things that I don't even remember the proper definitions of like simile and metaphor and analogy and crazy turns of phrase and rhythms. Those I can't even type here.

But as good as "Book of Isaiah" is, it's "The Fall of Rome" and even, more, "The Glass Essay" which are the knock outs here. "The Glass Essay," for me, might be one of the most powerful break-up poems I've read. (But again, I'm new to poetry.) The poem revolves around a stand in for Anne Carson who has recently broken up with a great love. She is visiting her mom who lives in the moors. She (Carson) brings along the complete works of Emily Bronte. So we bounce between Anne's reflections on her dead relationship; her current stunted relationship with her mom, the landscape of the moors, and her senile father; and her (and others) relations to and reflections on the unknowable Emily.

Ok... I have more to say, but I've had enough of heartbreak; enough tears; enough disappointment... I have a party to go to, and women to meet, and emotions to access, and heartbreak to come, and past love to repress, so I can rinse and repeat; rinse and repeat; until I can pretend to come out clean and Downy fresh. Or more likely: come home alone and even more despondent and sad, and go back to Anne Carson and Dana Ward and read until I go to sleep; or more realistically, even: read, then try to watch porn but end up lying in bed with a hand in my shorts and an arm over my eyes until I finally, finally drift off to bad dreams about loveless days and a lonely death...

Maybe, and unfortunately, more later.

[Raul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I especially liked the first part of this book, The Glass Essay, which begins with the narrator’s visit to her mother and how the landscape and the cold brings to her mind the moors and Emily Bronte. Writing on love loss, relations between children and parents, and aging and disease, and Emily Bronte, and holding onto the past that has this incredible bit:

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?.

The middle part of the book of the book didn’t resonate with me like the first part did but I couldn’t stop thinking of the following lines after I’d read them:

What is the holiness of empire?
It is to know collapse.

Everything can collapse.
Houses, bodies
and enemies

collapse
when their rhythm becomes
deranged.

The final part of the book, less lyrical and taking the more traditional prosaic form of the essay, was stupendous. The Gender of Sound explores the ways the non-masculine voice and sound has been treated from antiquity to the present age, from the gorgons, the furies, the sirens, Kassandra, and references from the classicist poets to Aristotle and others, and the patriarchal function of silencing women:

“Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.”

That the female voice or unmanly voice (as Carson includes catamites, eunuchs and androgynes in this study) brings discomfort in a patriarchal structure and vocal comportment becomes a way to enforce gender roles:

“Verbal continence is an essential feature of the masculine virtue of sophrosyne (“prudence, soundness of mind, moderation, temperance, self-control”) that organizes most patriarchal thinking on ethical or emotional matters….
It is a fundamental assumption of these gender stereotypes that a man in his proper condition of sophrosyne should be able to dissociate himself from his own emotions and so their sound. It is a corollary assumption that man’s proper civic responsibility towards woman is to control her sound for her insofar as she cannot control herself.”

I’ve long wanted to read a book by Anne Carson, and this was a great first read. I’ll end this review with this wonderful contemplation at the book’s end:

“I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another essence than self.”

[Tomás ☁️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

es superdotada

la primera parte, en la que cambia a los griegos por las brontë como punto de referencia, me tuvo varias veces al borde del desmayo

la mejor, la más lista, la más lúcida, la más divertida... tqm

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You remember too much, / my mother said to me recently. / Why hold onto all that? And I said / Where can I put it down?" (10).

I found Carson's "The Glass Essay" to be riveting when I first read it in Lyric Essay (one of the Wheaton classes I miss the most), and it continually amazes me how art has an uncanny ability to meet us precisely where we are, taking on new meanings with time as we grow. I was so deeply moved by it all over again, dwelling on different verses this time round. Anne Carson's words, like "On the Sensation of Aeroplane Takeoff," have a way of nestling in and floating back to me in my most unguarded moments, and I think that's a mark of enduring poetry.

[Kiki Bolwijn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the glass essay, enjoyed the book of Isaiah and reread the gender of sound 3 times because it is so powerful and important. Did not care for the Truth about God but Carson 's style and heart made this book to be one of my favorites. I will buy you all a copy for Christmas.

2023: nog steeds een banger

2023.2: Deze doet het altijd.

[Ren He · Rating 5 out of 5]

sososooso goooood... anne carson makes me want to crack my brain open

[Helen McClory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contains my favourite poem/essay of all time and is pretty much brain-stretching brilliance throughout.

[s · Rating 4 out of 5]

greaty+permanently appreciate the way carson discusses womanhood from the perspective of someone who is both stymied by and disidentifies with it

[Steven Marciano · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Glass Essay is the jewel in the crown. A poem that had me reflecting on my own life's prisons and the pain of lost love. But there's more to enjoy and ponder in this collection too. I was particularly enamoured with The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide, a poem in which Carson recalls a trip to the Italian city where she works through a sense of alienation, weaving classical myth and philosophy into a poetic memoir that has become somewhat a trademark of her style. I loved this part, which is something I have felt when abroad (and at home at times) but have been unable to express so succinctly. Probably because I am not Anne Carson:

What is the holiness of the citizen?
It is to open

a day

to a stranger,
who has no day
of his own.

The final piece, Gender of Sound is an insightful essay on how the sound of the voice shapes our perception of gender, using examples from ancient Greece and Rome (of course), through to the modern day, and how those perceptions have created barriers for women in society due to the female voice, in its tone and usage, being judged as something in opposition to societal order. Really well researched and thought-provoking.

Very likely a book I will revisit in the months and years to come.

[Northpapers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is there a great poet of our lifetimes? I'm not qualified to answer the question, but Anne Carson may be the great poet of my personal, reading lifetime so far, at least.

This work is well-rooted in classical thought and in narrative movement and scene. So when Carson shapes something new, it carries in its new sprigs the massive weight of Western thought. Its innovations, observations, and protests are all worthy of their history.

Glass, Irony and God is a series of poems (I'm tempted to call them "narrative poems" because of the potent sensations of scene, character, and movement) and one essay (the inclusion of which almost knocked it down a star for me, until I began thinking on the overall themes) about the soul under pressure. Its subject is evoked in scene, in literary and historical criticism, in worship, in rebellion, in direct attacks, and in singsong flybys.

What Carson says about her subject is, well, just read the thing and find out for yourself.

[ciel · Rating 5 out of 5]

ObSeSsEd with 'The Glass Essay'

[Ryan Schwartz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection, although sometimes wordy and pretentious (a word I hate to associate with a super intelligent female writer, but I mean it in a good way) had one of the best poems I’ve ever read. If you aren’t going to pick up this collection, the glass essay is something worth reading on its own. The final essay in this was also super interesting and related to Greek mythology and women, which I found fun. I would probably appreciate this even more if I were to reread it, as it was honestly just pretty heavy.

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

prachtig mooi wauw, heb vast de helft maar begrepen maar who cares als iets zo mooi is opgeschreven. vond niet alle delen zo geweldig, maar alsnog vijf sterren.

"God zweeg. Dat werd hun contract. Aan beide zijden broos, geen leugens."

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Poets distinguish themselves by the way they see. A dull poet is one who sees fashionably or blindly what he thinks poets see. The original poet sees with new eyes, or with imported vision (as with Eliot seeing like Laforgue or Pound like the Chinese). Anne Carson’s eyes are original. We are not yet used to them and she may seem unpoetic or joltingly new, like Whitman or Emily Dickinson in their day. She writes in a kind of mathematics of the emotions, with daring equations and recurring sets and subsets of images.” — Guy Davenport, writing in the introduction to this book

Anne Carson, what a continual and uncompromising genius! I look forward to reading every word she's ever published. "The Glass Essay" is a masterpiece, and the rest of this little book is brilliant as well.

“My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.”

[Laurie Neighbors · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rivals my dedication, even, to Autobiography of Red. Now I'm kicking myself for not having read it sooner. I was wary that the book would not be able to keep up its running start from "A Glass Essay," but I was intrigued by "TV Men," and so entranced by "The Fall of Rome" that I started it over again when I read the last installment, before going on to the rest of the book. The essay at the end, "The Gender of Sound" provides clues for you to unravel when reading Plainwater, which would be a smart next step. Peas in a pod, except if peas were like snowflakes. Well, really all of AC's work is like that, snap to fit many ways you like it, always some undiscovered pattern with each reading, but never an exact end in sight. No other writer compares.

[ra · Rating 5 out of 5]

anne carson is a genius. as usual, some of this went over my head (sorry to Book of Isaiah), but i know i'll be revisiting The Glass Essay, TV Men, and the Gender of Sound for years to come. there's just something about anne carson's writing that sticks no matter how far you go.

— "i wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. or indeed, another human essence than self."

[Max Thien · Rating 5 out of 5]

"As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women."

"My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it."

[kennedy clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

um yea it’s perfect and the synchronicity of the date i finished it says so,,,, may 22 2022 xoxo 😘

[etherealacademia · Rating 4 out of 5]

i loved the glass essay and the gender of sound. a lot of the other pieces were hit or miss

[Suzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.”

[Jenna Watson]

The Glass Essay, come on!!!

[lauren :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

anne carson makes me believe poetry could be good