Between Us And: A Selection of Anne Carson's Works
- Meri Utkovska
- Dec 27, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
About Anne Carson
Anne Carson occupies a singular position in contemporary literature—an acclaimed poet, translator, classicist, and essayist whose work consistently defies conventional genre boundaries. With a career rooted in classical scholarship and shaped by a restless experimental spirit, Carson has created a body of work that bridges antiquity and modernity, bringing ancient Greek texts into sharp dialogue with contemporary language, emotion, and form. Her writing is known for its intellectual rigor, intertextual depth, and striking originality, blending poetic fragments, scholarly commentary, autobiography, and myth in ways that challenge traditional expectations of literary structure.
Carson’s innovative approach is perhaps most evident in works such as Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, and Nox, each illustrating her ability to merge classical references with personal narrative and philosophical inquiry. Her engagement with figures like Sappho, Euripides, and Gertrude Stein reflects a lifelong fascination with how language shapes understanding—how it collapses, fragments, and reforms through time. As a result, Carson has become a defining figure for readers, students, and scholars seeking literature that stretches the limits of genre while remaining deeply rooted in the history of ideas.
Anne Carson's Poems
BETWEEN US AND
BETWEEN US AND
animals is a namelessness.
We flail around
generically —
camelopardalis is what
the Romans came up with
or "giraffe" ( it looked to
them like a camel crossed
with a leopard ) or get the
category wrong — a musk
Ox isn't an ox at all but
more closely cognate with
the goat — and when
choosing to name
individual animals we
pretend they are objects
(Spot) or virtues (Beauty)
or just other selves (Bob).
Anne Carson, "Between Us And" from Red Doc>. Copyright © 2014 by Anne Carson.
Short Talk on Pain
Lawns and fields and hills and wide old velvet
sleeves, green things. They stretch, fold, roll away,
unfurl and calm the eye. Look lush in paintings.
Battles are fought on greens. Or you could spread
a meal and sup. How secretly they lie, floors of
distant forests. Next comes the grave, in many a
poem about green. But this is not a poem. This is a
billboard for frozen green peas. Frozen green peas
are good for pain.
Copyright © 2023 by Anne Carson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 25, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love
I like being with you all night with closed eyes.
What luck—here you are
coming
along the stars!
I did a road trip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Copyright © 2020 by Anne Carson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 10, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
V. Here Is My Propaganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin
Like many a wife I boosted the husband up to Godhood and held him there.
What is strength?
Opposition of friends or family merely toughens it.
I recall my mother’s first encounter with him.
Glancing
at a book I’d brought home from school with his name inscribed on the flyleaf
she said
I wouldn’t trust anyone who calls himself X—and
something exposed itself in her voice,
a Babel
thrust between us at that instant which we would never
learn to construe—
taste of iron.
Prophetic. Her prophecies all came true although she didn’t
mean them to.
Well it’s his name I said and put the book away. That was the first night
(I was fifteen)
I raised my bedroom window creak by creak and went out to meet him
in the ravine, traipsing till dawn in the drenched things
and avowals
of the language that is “alone and first in mind.” I stood stupid
before it,
watched its old golds and lieblicher blues abandon themselves
like peacocks stepping out of cages into an empty kitchen of God.
God
or some blessed royal personage. Napoleon. Hirohito. You know
how novelist Ōe
describes the day Hirohito went on air and spoke
as a mortal man. “The adults sat around the radio
and cried.
Children gathered in the dusty road and whispered bewilderment.
Astonished
and disappointed that their emperor had spoken in a voice.
Looked at one another in silence. How to believe God had
become human
on a designated summer day?” Less than a year after our marriage
my husband
began to receive calls from [a woman] late at night.
If I answered [she]
hung up. My ears grew hoarse.
How are you.
—
No.
—
Maybe. Eight. Can you.
—
The white oh yes.
—
Yes.
What is so ecstatic unknowable cutthroat glad as the walls
of the flesh
of the voice of betrayal —yet all the while lapped in talk more dull
than the tick of a clock.
A puppy
learns to listen this way. Sting in the silver.
Ōe says
many children were told and some believed that when the war was over
the emperor would wipe away their tears
with his own hand.
Copyright Credit: Anne Carson, "V. Here Is My Propoganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin" from The Beauty of the Husband. Copyright © 2001 by Anne Carson.
Source: The Beauty of the Husband (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2001)
More like this:
Life is Not Fair: Anne Carson for the Louisian Channel
Anne Carson: Essential Books
Autobiography of Red
(PAPERBACK)
Description
courtesy of Amazon.com and Bookshop.org
The award-winning poet reinvents a genre in a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.
Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
"Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today." --Michael Ondaatje
"A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." --The New York Times Book Review
"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday." --The Village Voice
Nox
(HARDBACK)
Description
courtesy of Amazon.com and Bookshop.org
Anne Carson’s haunting and beautiful Nox is her first book of poetry in five years―a unique, illustrated, accordion-fold-out “book in a box.”
Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry. 50 color and black-and-white prints.
Men in the Off Hours (Vintage Contemporaries)
(PAPERBACK)
Description
courtesy of Amazon.com and Bookshop.org
Anne Carson has been acclaimed by her peers as the most imaginative poet writing today. In a recent profile, The New York Times Magazine paid tribute to her amazing ability to combine the classical and the modern, the mundane and the surreal, in a body of work that is sure to endure.
In Men in the Off Hours, Carson offers further proof of her tantalizing gifts. Reinventing figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon, Carson sets up startling juxtapositions: Lazarus among video paraphernalia, Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war, Edward Hopper paintings illuminated by St. Augustine. And in a final prose poem, she meditates movingly on the recent death of her mother. With its quiet, acute spirituality and its fearless wit and sensuality, Men in the Off Hours shows us a fiercely individual poet at her best.
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