Year: 1999
Type: article
Abstract: Autobiographyof Red and Other Anthropologies I have been a devoted reader of Anne Carson for several years now, and when I saw her novel Autobiography of Red in a bookstore last spring, I bought it immediately.I won't say I didn't even open the book first?I did?and it looked beautiful.Most of the book is written in alternating long and short lines spaced commodiously on the page; not so much "verse" in any strict metrical sense, more like broken up, though poetic, prose: It was raining on his face.He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart then he remembered.Sick lurch downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple.Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.This form, and the book's tone, seemed to give off a feeling of tenderness, almost like being rocked.I left the bookstore and went to the nearest caf? to drink espresso and read, as that is what I do with books I am preparing to love.Anne Carson is a professor of classics as well as a poet, and her books are a fine marriage of these talents.But what makes them particularly interesting to me is a third obsession, her study of the longing for, and loss of, romantic love.I say "study" deliberately, as this is a subject to which she brings the scholar's passion for knowledge.There is a resemblance, she says, between "the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker.... I would Uke to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive."This is from Carson's first book, Eros the Bittersweet, a scholarly and poetic meditation on Greek love poetry distilled from her doctoral thesis in classics.
Source: The Iowa Review
Author: Sharon Wahl
Institution: University of Iowa
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1468579278