POETRY Wrong Norma Anne Carson Jonathan Cape, $34.95 Anne Carson’s new book affirms everything that is most exhilarating about her work. It is both rigorous and random, by turns deeply funny and unsparingly dark, a collection of 25 pieces of every kind — stories, poems, fragments, drawings, translations, works that evade categorisation.
One is styled as a lecture, another was first published as a comic, and they vary in length from 18 pages to 16 lines. Almost all of them have appeared elsewhere, most often in The New Yorker . In a note on the back of the book Carson tells us they “are not linked.
That’s why I’ve called them wrong,” which feels like characteristically artful misdirection. Not explicitly linked, perhaps, but connected to each other in the fascinating, labyrinthine, light-footed fashion of so much of her work. Anne Carson’s writing teems with energy and the unexpected.
This is writing that enacts discovery, that reflects on itself, on reading, thought, association, creation, failure, impossibility, silence. It teems with energy and the unexpected, embraces characters from mythology and classical literature, poets, writers and philosophers as well as figures who seem to have wandered in from the streets or out of a half-forgotten observation. A fox — the animal and its representation — reappears in various guises.
Godot himself turns up, via the telephone, to reveal his first name. There is a comically mournful prose poem about dinner plans tha.