Anne Carson
continued
Her new book, Decreation, labels itself as "Poetry, Essays, Opera," continuing Carson's restless search through the usual categories. The title comes from one of Carson's heroes, the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil, who essentially starved herself to death during World War II. Carson writes, "Simone Weil was . . . a person who wanted to get herself out of the way so as to arrive at God. 'The self,' she says in one of her notebooks, 'is only a shadow projected by sin and error which blocks God's light, and which I take for a Being.' Weil had a program for getting the self out of the way which she called 'decreation.' . . . 'To undo the creature in us' is one of the ways she describes its aim."
That passage might make you think that Anne Carson's path through her work has been essentially a spiritual journey, but that category, too, fails to fit. It does nothing to explain her work's rigorous intellectual engagement. And it doesn't help us understand the moving personal voice of the poem "Lines," which appears earlier in Decreation. "Lines" begins:
| While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone. Paperclips in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks longingly of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction. Out the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother, love of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling faster now. |
