Poem: ‘Guillermo’s Sigh Symphony’
Anne Carson, 7 February 2002
Do you hear sighing. Do you wake amid a sigh. Radio sighs AM, FM. Shortwave sighs crackle in from the Atlantic....
Anne Carson
Anne Carson’s collections of poetry include Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, Nox and The Beauty of the Husband, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her many translations of classical works include An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Antigone and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. Her H of H Playbook, inspired by Euripides’ Herakles, is being made into an opera.
Four Poems from ‘The Beauty of the Husband’
Anne Carson, 13 April 2000
IX. But what word was it
Word that overnight showed up on all the walls of my life inscribed simpliciter no explanation. What is the power of the unexplained. There he was one day (new town) in a hayfield outside my school standing under a black umbrella in a raw picking wind. I never asked how he got there a distance of maybe three hundred miles. To ask
would break some rule. Have you ever...
Letter
Criminal Justice
24 June 1993
Ronan Bennett is to be congratulated for a thoroughly impressive piece of journalism, scholarship and self-control (LRB, 24 June). It is not rare nowadays to be moved to shock and anger by a story of inequities in our so-called justice system; what is rare is to be moved beyond shock and anger – to hope – by the scrupulosity with which such a story is told.
Podcasts & Videos
Podcast
A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways
Anne Carson
8 November 2012
Anne Carson reads her poem, ‘A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways’.
Podcast
28 September 2013
In a rare UK performance Canadian poet Anne Carson read from her recent verse novel Red Doc>, a sequel to her 1998 Autobiography of Red.
Pieces about Anne Carson in the LRB
Backwards is north: Anne Carson’s ‘Wrong Norma’
Michael Wood, 10 October 2024
The pieces in Wrong Norma are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be found in the idea of wrongness, which appears not as a fact or a verdict but as a feeling.
Professor or Pinhead: Anne Carson
Stephanie Burt, 14 July 2011
Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet,...
Let’s Cut to the Wail: The Oresteia according to Anne Carson
Michael Wood, 11 June 2009
Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three...
Tongue breaks: Sappho
Emily Wilson, 8 January 2004
Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the...
The man who would put to sea on a bathmat: Anne Carson
Elizabeth Lowry, 5 October 2000
I am going to end up talking about love, but let me start by talking about money. Money, as Marx tells us, is the enemy of mankind and social bonds. ‘If you suppose man to be man and his...
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