The poem I’ve returned to most often over the past decade or so is a 39-page diamond mine called ‘The Glass Essay’ by Anne Carson. Every stanza of this masterpiece sends bolts of pleasure and recognition ricocheting through me.

Anthony Doerr, The New York Times

Glass, Irony, And God

Poetry by Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s poetry––characterized by various reviewers as “short talks,” “essays,” or “verse narratives”––combines the confessional and the critical in a voice all her own. Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson in Glass, Irony and God weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style. This collection includes “The Glass Essay,” a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson’s reading of the Brontë sisters, “Book of Isaiah,” which evokes the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism, and “The Fall of Rome,” about her trip to “find” Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of terrible alienation there.

Paperback(published Nov, 01 1995)

ISBN
9780811213028
Price US
14.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
160
Portrait of Anne Carson

Anne Carson

Canadian poet, essayist and translator of Greek mythology

The poem I’ve returned to most often over the past decade or so is a 39-page diamond mine called ‘The Glass Essay’ by Anne Carson. Every stanza of this masterpiece sends bolts of pleasure and recognition ricocheting through me.

Anthony Doerr, The New York Times

Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today.

Michael Ondaatje

A striking book.

Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books

Here, from the muse of paradox, from Eros the Bittersweet, are poems that shuttle and veer between Hebraism and Hellenism, serendipity and the full blown sequence, the wry and the wondrous, autobiography and the story of the race.

Robert Fagles