Anne Carson, _Glass, Irony & God_

THE FIRST BOOK by Carson I read was Autobiography of Red, and I have basically kept up since then without ever getting around to exploring the back catalogue. That is, until now, and so I am thinking what a fool I was not to get around to it sooner. Glass, Irony & God leapfrogged right over everything else to become my favorite Carson volume.

As in her other work, the poems here reflect her co-vocation as scholar, and as in her other work the scholarship is lightly carried, never throwing the poem out of equilibrium, and never losing a lyrical quality. It's almost as though she were the last of the High modernists--which makes it stunningly appropriate that the book is introduced by Guy Davenport, the then (1995) reigning Last High modernist. The torch is passed.

Eliot and Pound were rarely as funny and never as self-deprecating as Carson can be, though, to say nothing of their being less acute about gender questions by several orders of magnitude.

And that's one of her paintings on the cover.