TheoriesofFalling http://www.zolandpoetry.com/reviews/2010/v2/Carson.

htm

Nox
Anne Carson

$29.95 / scroll in hard case

isbn 9780811218702

New Directions

Review by Michael Lindgren

Back to Reviews
To call Anne Carson’s staggering Nox a book of poetry is not quite accurate, for both its physical
Michael Lindgren is a former editor and
and psychic dimensions transcend traditional taxonomies of genre. Nox is many things: an artist’s
bookseller whose reviews and essays have
appeared in the Washington Post, the book, a journal, a collage, an elegy, a meditation on grief, and a souvenir, in the literal sense. It is a
Cleveland Plain Dealer, Boston Review, n+1
online, and the Brooklyn Rail. A musician, poet, powerful statement of personal loss couched in a language of classical rigor, a spiritual exorcism
and painter, he divides his time between
given artifactual manifestation.
Manhattan and Pennsylvania.

To start with Nox’s physical attributes: the book is a careful facsimile of a document the grief-
stricken Carson assembled on the occasion of her estranged brother’s death. As such, it is
essentially a replica of a scrapbook, containing pasted-in snippets of letters, photos, stained scraps
of typing, lexical entries, a translation, and a smattering of jagged, abstract drawings; in the words
of Joyelle McSweeney, “a {poetic} model based on an attractively varied set of transhistorical and
cross-disciplinary examples.”1 It has been printed not as a traditional codex but as one
uninterrupted accordion-style folding document, which in turn has been housed in a handsome if
slightly forbidding case. Not your average book of word-slinging, to be sure.

All of this armature—and hats off to New Directions for a very pleasingly designed and printed
volume indeed—would be peripheral, even self-indulgent, if the book’s unusual format was not
mirrored by the strange beauty and emotional intensity of it contents. As glimpses of Carson’s
relation with her troubled brother begin to surface through the textual and graphical chaos, the
loss gradually accumulates a fatalistic inevitability worthy of Carson’s classical models. Carson’s
brother, his life and his death both, were mysteries to Carson, and they remain mysteries to the
reader, which is in part the source of their evocative and haunting appeal.

At first perusal Nox strikes the reader as capricious and disorienting, but as one progresses
through the trajectory of Carson’s mourning some structural elements begin to recur and thus to
emerge. The first of these is her use of lexical entries, as from a Latin dictionary, both as motif and
as explicit manifestation of her fundamentally classicist, in the original sense of the word, outlook.
For this reader, it was a revelation to find with what incantatory, onrushing velocity a lexical entry
reads:

fortuna: the more or less personified agency supposed to direct events, Fortune…;
ill-starred; the way in which events fall out, chance, hazard; a favorable occasion;
what befalls or is destined to befall, one’s fate; (applied to persons whose destiny is
bound up with one’s own); prosperity, good fortune; unfortunate circumstances,
bad luck; social position, rank, station; greatness; wealth, property, fortune.

This particular entry is typical of the whole in that it is subtly but inescapably apposite to the

1 of 2 12/16/10 10:13 PM
TheoriesofFalling http://www.zolandpoetry.com/reviews/2010/v2/Carson.htm

death of Carson’s brother, whose life was “ill-starred” and “bound up with” Carson’s “own” indeed.
Through repetition, both contextual and rhythmic, all of the lexical entries come to take on this
strange, elegiac undertone.

The book’s second textual variant consists of short blocks of prose detailing the gradual
disappearance of her brother: “All the years and time that had passed over him came streaming
into me, all that history.” These sequences, numbered as neatly as examples in a grammar
textbook, are harrowing in the disjunction between their tragic implications and their matter-
of-fact tone. Commentators have frequently noted the unadorned nature of Carson’s work—it is
often elastic, to put it mildly, in meter and line—and these passages attest to this plainness of
approach. “I guess it never ends,” Carson writes, ostensibly of her attempts to make sense of a
Catullan ode. “A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.”

In contrast to these fairly straightforward entries stand fragments of verse (“I love the old
questions”, “I am curious about the season of coldness you have there”) that dot the manuscript
like snatches of a half-remembered poem or an overheard conversation. These phrases, elliptical,
dreamlike, have the power to evoke Carson’s loss by indirection, partly in counterpoint to the
prose segments, but also by their function as captions to the fourth and most dominant structural
facet of Nox, which is its searing graphical elements. The pages contain many blurry, sepia-toned
snapshots and snippets of typed or scrawled letters, often sliced into fanned-out ribbons, as if the
collagist were deranged by grief. These last visuals prove in some ways to be the most jarring;
there is something violent and desperate about the way they are splattered across the page.

The cumulatie effect of this multimedia assault is dazzling. The expression of grief that Carson
delineates creeps up on the reader, its effect being all the more vivid for its subtlety and slow
accretion. The ultimate source of Nox’s power is Carson’s deeply classical aesthetic, as she seeks to
express a very modern—actually rather sordid and commonplace—loss in a way that is steeped in
the alien sensibility of an ancient culture, what Sainte-Beuve referred to as “the vast living
expression of a whole epoch and a semi-barbarous civilization.”2 This is a very unusual position
from which to attack the craft; as a prosodic tactic it seems, to this reader, quite possibly unique.
Carson’s poetic voice genuinely has more in common with the ancient poets of Rome than it does
with her twentieth-century peers: although there are some very private and intensely personal
emotions portrayed, one would never think to describe Carson’s poetry as “confessional” in the
same way as Lowell or Plath. Even the towering elegies of Shelley and Tennyson, by comparison,
seem a mite… soggy, when contrasted with the radical austerity of Carson’s reflections. All told
Nox is a singular achievement, and if its strategies are a bit opaque, it nevertheless stands as an
affecting document and the product of an original and fertile mind working in a highly distinctive
vein.

2 of 2 12/16/10 10:13 PM