Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours (Cape, 2000)
I tend to devote these posts of favourite passages from contemporary poetry collections to poets I suppose underknown--which is to say that for all Carson's reputation and celebrity, I want to persuade ever more people to read her work. If you've noticed the chronological succession of these posts, they result from my running a reading group on her work in which a group of women poets meet in Bath every few months or so to discuss the next book. Today this is the book! Here are some favourite passages:
Here lies the refugee breather
Who drank a bowl of elsewhere.
end of 'Epitaph: Zion'
A fell dark pink February heaven
Was
Pulling the clouds home, balancing massacre
On the rips.
end of 'Epitaph: Oedipus' Nap'
...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.
from 'Essay on What I Think About Most'
Coldness coming paring down from the moonbone in the sky.
from 'Father's Old Blue Cardigan'
A gradual dazzle
upon
the ceiling
Gives me that
racy
bluishyellow
feeling
As hours
blow
the
wide
way
Down my afternoon.
from 'Room in Brooklyn'
Desire, the trees are rags. Desire, streaks of it
scalding the fog.
*
In sex (he told her) the mind evaporates and suddenly
the body is there,
just the body with its reaches.
*
But the day with its doors, accusations, tomatoes
with its rosemilk breasts of girls,
rain, cold, mad people and heartburn--
wore him to the nub.
from 'TV Men: Tolstoy'
...particles
thrown off by a soul as it cools.
from 'TV Men: Akhmatova (Treatment for a Script)'