Men in the Off Hours - Softcover

Carson, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375707565 ISBN 13: 9780375707568

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

Anne Carson has been acclaimed by her peers as the most imaginative poet writing today. In a recent profile, The New York Times Magazine paid tribute to her amazing ability to combine the classical and the modern, the mundane and the surreal, in a body of work that is sure to endure.

In Men in the Off Hours, Carson offers further proof of her tantalizing gifts. Reinventing figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon, Carson sets up startling juxtapositions: Lazarus among video paraphernalia, Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war, Edward Hopper paintings illuminated by St. Augustine. And in a final prose poem, she meditates movingly on the recent death of her mother. With its quiet, acute spirituality and its fearless wit and sensuality, Men in the Off Hours shows us a fiercely individual poet 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: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375707565
• ISBN 13: 9780375707568
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176