PLAINWATER: ESSAYS AND POETRY, by Anne Carson. Alfred A. Knopf, 262 pages. $23.
On a wet afternoon some years ago a friend loaned me Eros the Bittersweet, a lyrical, crisply intelligent essay on Sappho, poetics, and love. This was, I quickly realized, the book I had wanted to read when I bought books like Julia Kristeva's Tales of Love or George Bataille's Erotism. I remember the fat summer raindrops that spattered the cover, and the slow, delicious shock as I read. The one thing I forgot, until a month ago, was the name of the author. Passionate, magisterial, she somehow stayed anonymous as well.
In the decade since Eros the Bittersweet, Canadian poet and classics professor Anne Carson has published scholarly essays, other "essays" that turn out to be fiction, and prize-winning poems in both verse and prose. Two new collections, Glass, Irony and God and Plainwater, gather a rangy sample of her work. Together they come to 400 pages. I wish there were more. Carson is the most elusive, reflective, intriguing new poet I have read all year. With her feints, footnotes, and anonymity, she reminds me of Nabokov -- or, better, of Eliot, "the Invisible Poet," as Hugh Kenner called him. And since her work invokes Apollo Loxias (the "god of few words and concise expression") and marries him to the risky, unsettling rhythms of ololyga (a "disorderly female sound" associated "with wild space, with savagery and the supernatural"), she's a latter-day Dickinson, too.
To glimpse Carson's Dickinsonian power -- as good a place as any to begin -- take a look at "The Glass Essay," the first piece in Glass, Irony and God. This "essay" is a 37-page narrative poem, divided into short pieces that are more chapters than shards of a sequence.
"Whenever I visit my mother," the speaker confesses early on, "I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë." She tells the story of the visit, muses on Brontë, and tells you of her broken love affair with a man named Law. In its reading of one rapt, unhappy passion through two others -- Heathcliff's for Catherine and Brontë's for her unknown, perhaps unearthly "Thou" -- it draws an essayist's discursive bead on its subject. But more deeply, it's an "essay" (that is, an attempt) at something otherwise unwritable. How to compose a poem of Brontëan or Dickinsonian fierceness, Carson asks herself, in an age that sniffs out the family romance and literary sources of such song from its first notes? Write it as fiction, or call it an essay, or both, and you slip your lyric through the cracks in irony's armor. The narrator's learning lets her see herself more clearly. The poet's head-fakes mask, and bare, the heart.
Most of Glass, Irony and God is in verse, either narrative or aphoristic and philosophical. (The one exception, "The Gender of Sound," is the cleanly argued essay that taught me about Apollo Loxias and ololyga. It grows speculative, prophetic, even poetic by the close.) Plainwater, by contrast, is mostly in prose -- but it loses no intellectual torque or emotional power. Carson's "Short Talks," for example, are a set of one-paragraph prose poems that take the common carbon of the essay and squeeze it into diamond. What dazzles is the breadth of her knowledge, cut by the rigorous wit of her technique.
Take a look at "On the Rules of Perspective," a paragraph on Braque, a portrait of the Cubist as a minor-league Othello:
A bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of his objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque.
The painter would rather see Nature dead than feel the shame of its being beyond him, ungraspable, something he can't take "full possession" of.
His petulant declaration "nature morte" -- the French for "still life" -- turns out to be a bad trick in its own right: as dishonest as that glib modernist quip about portrait painters. And yet, just as you want to conclude that Cubism tried to kill nature, but wounded only art, Carson's expert use of Cubist techniques in her prose keeps things complicated. Carson packs an essay, even a book into this short talk. (Call it Modern Art and the Refusal of Shame.) Other talks, on Kafka, on Camille Claudel, on the Mona Lisa, share its flair and density.
In the last of the "Short Talks," Carson says she writes to be "as wrong as possible." As an ars poetica, this calls Stein to mind: the Stein of Tender Buttons, who found that taking care to write "wrongly" paradoxically gave her work an "incredible justice and likeness." One hears a Steinese accent in several "Short Talks," and still more in the "verbal photographs" that make up "The Life of Towns" (in Plainwater). But Carson's "wrongness" lies more in its deft textual weaving of truth and fiction than in Stein's Cubist shuffle and breakdown. The narrator of "Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Difference Between Men and Women" writes journal entries that cite lines from the Bible and Wittgenstein as "classical Chinese wisdom." You'd follow her voice anywhere, but you can't quite trust her. An appendix lets you spot the parallels between her entries and the maps drawn by a certain Lady Cheng in 1553 -- but who wrote the appendix? And is there, at that, a Lady Cheng?
If Carson merely built such mazes, she would be an interesting poet. What makes her powerful, too, is the way her mazes turn out to be as windswept and sublime as Brontë's moors. The first section of Plainwater, "Mimnermos: the Brainsex Paintings," seems at first a Borgesian puzzle. Carson translates fragments from a seventh-century-BC Greek poet, offers a thorough, thoughtful essay on his work, and then gives a set of "interviews." I hope Mimnermos is a hoax: a mask behind which Carson gets to write some terse and memorable "archaic" poems, teach you how to read such work, and reflect on the passion that draws her to the vanished poets she loves. (The name "Mimnermos," after all, suggests the Greek for memory -- think "mnemonic" -- and imitation -- think "mime.") But the sequence also serves as an essay on the way a scholar's passion for her subject -- which, like Nature to Braque, will always prove unpossessable -- serves as a figure for all longing, and much of love. The Interviewer longs to grasp her subject. Mimnermos, though, longs for "Nanno." Was she a flute girl? the Interviewer wonders. Is "Nanno" the title of an epic, now lost? Was the name only used for the sake of naming, a mere "epistemological strategy"? (The Greek "nano" would mean something small.) The poet grows angry, then curt, resigned, bereft. "I wrote her epitaph," he finally replies. Here is their final exchange:
I: I don't believe I know this piece
M: It was never published the family disapproved
I: I don't suppose you could
M: No
I: But
M: No
I: I wanted to know you
M: I wanted far more o
