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Jeff Brown
Anne Carson
RED DOC
By Anne Carson
167 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
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Heres what else she gets away with: Most of the poems in
Red Doc> are delivered in narrow strips of type, justified
at both margins like newspaper columns. Its a format that
counterintuitively speeds you down the page, as if creating
a chute for language. It also constricts in ways that put
useful pressure on the poems wild music and wilder state
of mind. Carson remains a master of idiosyncratic figures,
delivering metaphor and simile casually and suddenly,
while keeping her language idiomatically oddball.
Metaphors slide out of clipped fragments, torque
themselves from sentences pell-mell and complex. One
poem describes the landscape G and Sad drive through:
CROWS AS BIG as barns
rave overhead. Still
driving north. Night is a
slit all day is white.
Panels of torn planet loom
and line up one behind the
other to the far edge of
what eyes can see.
Or: Sad loves driving into this emptiness and his eyes are
bluer than holes in blue. Thats breathtaking, filling Sads
eyes with sky and absence, maybe blindness, and
melancholy. A steady diet of this would pall, but Carsons
also a terrific reporter. No metaphor, when G recounts a
TV nature show but what imagery:
Cheetah trips the gazelle.
Lands on it. Eats it.
Know your weapon says