Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

by Anne Carson

Book Overview

The poetry and prose collected in Plainwater are a testament to the extraordinary imagination of Anne Carson, a writer described by Michael Ondaatje as "the most exciting poet writing in English today." Succinct and astonishingly beautiful, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form, while juxtaposing classical and modern traditions. Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375708421
• ISBN13: 9780375708428
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Definning the "Essay"

Anne Carson comes from the genre of poetry, but in this book she has mixed that form with essays and come up withy a brilliant hybrid. If you like ideas that sing then this is the book for you! One of my absolute favorites!

the ancient world emerges

wow. i first picked up this book last week and am blown away. the work of anne carson seems to be speaking from a world only newly unearthed...grainy and weird and wonderful!

my favorite book ever

the last section of this book-- the anthropology of water-- is my favorite piece of writing i have ever read. it's amazing. you can read it 50 times and still get something new out of it.

I Praise

She's probably the most original writer at work in the English language at the moment. Challenging, yet rewarding; original, yet rooted firmly is an established tradition. Her work makes the genre--whatever it is--sing its own praises. There's no need for a review such as this.

Plainwater is a book heady with the theme of loss

Plainwater is a work of art that is unlike any contemporary piece of writing I've read. It's heady with the themes of loss and freedom and the narrator speaks from a place of quiet intensity that burns more vehemently with each observation. She is on a road-trip, the narrator, with a companion that threatens an isolation more profound than any found alone. Constantly is the backdrop, the theme, and the language of water. One can get lost in Carson's language and, like any work of poetry, the language crosses the line and becomes something else: you are at one point no longer reading but are taking in the narrator's interior life as your own. The landscape of your mind and the story has become one and the same through the median skin of the words. Can't recommend this book highly enough. Like Glass, Irony and God- it bespeaks of maps not really charted by any other contemporary writer but maps that any woman will recognize as partly her own. It crosses into philosophy and parable simply in its adherance to its own interiority: like Hesse, Goethe, Novalis, Holderlin, Rilke et al... it shifts into another kind of story, the kinds that are shamanistic, that place in the reader reflections of their own truth.