Men in the Off Hours

by Anne Carson

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375408037
• ISBN13: 9780375408038
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Exaltations of Mistake

Susan Sontag, one of the foremost thinkers and writers of today, says of Anne Carson: "[Anne Carson] is one of the few writers in English that I would read anything she wrote." Such regard for Carson is justified. One of the premiere poets today re-inventing and rediscovering language to meet our present demands of articulation, in the true post-modernist fashion, Carson has come up recently with a collection called, Men in the Off Hours, finalist to the National Book Critics Circle Award.Men in the Off Hours contains poems and prose pieces that lay the groundwork for various intersections of opposites: past and the present, the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. Here we can find the paintings of Edward Hopper turned into poems as footnoted by St. Augustine's words in the Confession, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf conversing about war, and a host of other characters summoned in the forefront of contemporary image-making: Sappho, Artaud, Tolstoy, Lazarus, Antigone, Akhmatova. They can be found in the chain of poems titled "TV Men" which re-images and re-imagines the lives of these personages, how they correspond to the contemporary definitions of the gaze, as shaped and articulated by woman-as-director, woman-as-creator. One of the best poems in the collection is "Essay on What I Think about Most" where Carson exalts the element of mistake, both in art and in our lives. It then makes a literary exegesis of a fragment poem written by Alkman, a 7th century B.C. Spartan poet, of how it masterfully harnesses the conceit of the mistake, and is interspersed with quotes by Aristotle. The persona declares: "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection." "Irony is not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve," on the other hand, is composed of a series of prose poems that narrativizes the days of Catherine Deneuve. Here Carson imagines herself as Deneuve, somewhere in a room in an academy in France, lecturing about Socrates and Sappho, catching all the knowing gazes by one of her female students, as the snow outside her window drives through everything like rain. The prose poems are short and episodic, almost breathless, representing the smallness of Daneuve's life, and the frailty of relationships, against a backdrop of a long, bitter winter.Carson is at best intellectual and scholarly in this collection. Her far-reaching vocabulary touches various human endeavors like myth, archaeology, science, history. Because of this pre-occupation with facts and quotes, Carson has debunked the lyric, freeing words from imposed musicality that poetry is almost always made to assume. Her poems are minefields, nuclear antechambers, blackholes. They are reckless, energetic, centrifugal. This attitude of Carson problematizes the poem as insular and solitary, breaking up its gates to the gift of intertext, where meaning yields to multiplicity. Told in such exquisite and piercing language, her long essay (complete with an annotated bibl

Deliberately Unstrung Hours

This review appeared, with discussions of Giacomo Leopardi and Jane Cooper, April 20, 2000, in the Seattle Weekly and is available online at http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0016/arts-lightfoot.shtmlAnne Carson's two previous books string their wonderful perturbations along narrative lines, but "Men in the Off Hours" is a deliberately unstrung chaos, which Carson calmly, almost academically sorts through. Metaphor, she decides, is "the willful creation of error," and poetry consists of misunderstandings and mistranslations (even by a classics professor like herself). Since "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection," the poet must try not only to accept mistakes but to enjoy them. Can she learn to accept the death of her mother as a kind of mistake, or to enjoy having taken as her "true love" a man who left her?Such a wholesale interpretation of the book is risky. Carson is always, as she says in Men, "uneasy with any claim to know exactly / what a poet means to say," and her poetry generally avoids the confessional mode. But this collection is filled with refugees from torments as searing as love's betrayal. Lazarus, the mad Artaud, Anna Akhmatova, the birds Audubon shot, wired and plumped into lifelike poses--their agony tells us truths. So do Carson's wisecracks, little word salads, and sardonic hurrahs ("At our backs is a big anarchy. If you are strong you can twist a bit off / and pound on it-- our freedom!"). This is a wickedly disquieting book, with footnotes. Its reassurances are its glinting intelligence and confident, humorous voice--when Carson read in Seattle last month, every syllable was as clear and knowing as laughter.

Deliberately Unstrung Hours

... Anne Carson's two previous books string their wonderful perturbations along narrative lines, but "Men in the Off Hours" is a deliberately unstrung chaos, which Carson calmly, almost academically sorts through. Metaphor, she decides, is "the willful creation of error," and poetry consists of misunderstandings and mistranslations (even by a classics professor like herself). Since "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection," the poet must try not only to accept mistakes but to enjoy them. Can she learn to accept the death of her mother as a kind of mistake, or to enjoy having taken as her "true love" a man who left her?Such a wholesale interpretation of the book is risky. Carson is always, as she says in "Men," "uneasy with any claim to know exactly / what a poet means to say," and her poetry generally avoids the confessional mode. But this collection is filled with refugees from torments as searing as love's betrayal. Lazarus, the mad Artaud, Anna Akhmatova, the birds Audubon shot, wired and plumped into lifelike poses--their agony tells us truths. So do Carson's wisecracks, little word salads, and sardonic hurrahs ("At our backs is a big anarchy. If you are strong you can twist a bit off / and pound on it-- our freedom!"). This is a wickedly disquieting book, with footnotes. Its reassurances are its glinting intelligence and confident, humorous voice--when Carson read in Seattle last month, every syllable was as clear and knowing as laughter.

brilliant

Anne Carson recently won a MacArthur, the "genius" grant, and deserved every penny of it, in my opinion. Yes, this book is crammed with historical allusions and persona poems in one form or another. No, it is not emotionally involving. And yes, occasionally she skates the fine line between postmodern cleverness and gimmicks, with all of the "tv scripts" and so forth. Nevertheless, the quality of writing and intellect at work here is absolutely stunning--and makes Anne Carson one of the most exciting, adventurous, and brilliant lyrical poets I've been reading. Unlike the "glass" essay in "Glass, Irony, & God," you will not get anything remotely resembling an intimate first person narrative here. If that's the kind of poetry you're looking for, this is definitely not the book for you. On the other hand, if you're looking for expanded possibilities in lyrical writing--the lyric operating in an intellectual/philosophical arena--or you enjoy experimental lyrical poets--then this book is well worth the money. It's a sheer tour-de-force in intellectual imagination and breathtaking lyrical lines that spin intelligently, if not emotionally, as some of the reviewers here have cited as a criticism.