The scholar is transparent and accountable, the poet inward and errant: anyone who reads Anne Carson has to suspend many such separations of power. The first monographic study of her work to date, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist makes the case for the acclaimed poet, classicist, and translator as a remarkable experimental scholar and reader, who rehearses scholarly methods while slipping their constraints of form and emotion. Carson's attention to sources-ancient and modern, textual or visual-is one of few constants across almost four decades of her published writing, whose uncertain claims on discipline and genre are claimed here as a certain interpretive style.
The book follows Carson's readings through variations in form-from early academic prose and poem-essays to creative adaptations and works for performance-to come to grips with what Coles calls Carson's transparency: not her easiness or literalism, but a taste for the exposure of her presence, process, and intent. Carson's portraits of working perform to readers even where she fantasizes her own erasure; where chance, poetic economy, impersonation, and imitation ride the line of anonymity. Coles situates Carson in a vibrant contemporary conversation around the essay, scholar-poets, and post-critical form, where creation transacts critique, and where roles and prerogatives are reset. Reading Carson as a reader, the book argues, is the most pressing way of reading her now.
To capture something as quicksilver as the work of the great Anne Carson is an achievement in itself but to elaborate a concept ("performative form") that divulges how Carson's aesthetic intentions manifest and effloresce on the page is a mark of brilliance. Elizabeth Sarah Coles's Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist proceeds with aphoristic flair and an erudite array of literary quotations, but what will remain with me is her dazzling invitation to view Carson's oeuvre as a ne plus ultra of mimesis, where the reader participates in a poetic performance "reproducing or mirroring an original experience so that it might happen again in reading or recital."
