![]() ![]() In the opening piece (not sure "poem" is the word), she shows how conversation (broken up by oblique dashes to indicate speakers) exists in free fall, has truant drive, need not be stapled to circumstance: ![]() And a randomiser is what every Carson reader needs to be. Red Doc> carries this dedication: "for the randomizer". Throughout, Carson disregards convention in a way that only a demob-happy classicist could. With him on the icy road are Sad – his lover and a war veteran – and Ida, an artist, irresistibly described as looking like "a very tough experimental baby". He abandons his day job as herdsman of muskoxen and sets off on a picaresque journey that takes in a glacier, a psychiatric clinic, a volcano and ice bats "the size of toasters". ![]() Her writing is wayward, entertaining and testing. Even non-fans would have to concede that she is an original. And she has pulled in an audience who would not ordinarily read poetry. A Canadian-born classicist (she has taught Greek at Princeton and elsewhere), Carson has a pile-up of awards to her name, from the TS Eliot prize to the MacArthur "genius grant". A nne Carson's Autobiography of Red, published in 1998, caused a sensation, a verse novel that reconstituted mythical Geryon – a red-winged monster – and Heracles and invented a modern narrative for them. ![]()
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