Anne Carson

(b.1950). Born in Toronto, Ontario, and educated at the University of Toronto (B.A., 1974; M.A. 1975; Ph.D., 1980), she was professor of classics at the University of Calgary (1979–80), at Princeton University (1980–7), and at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, from 1987to1988, when she became professor of classics at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.

A poet and essayist as well as a classical scholar, Carson uses the mixed genre, modernist fragment, and journal entry in an intensely personal quest to understand the nature and complexities of romantic love, family bonds, the self, and love of God. Her work—which has been championed by American writers Susan Sontag, Annie Dillard, and Guy Davenport—has appeared widely in the United States in leading literary journals such as Grand Street, and in The New Yorker, and her work has been reprinted in The best American poetry 1990 and The best American essays 1991, and, in Canada, in a Journey prize anthology. Four books indicate the unusual range of Carson's writing: Eros the bittersweet: an essay (1986), a reading of Sappho that focuses on the meaning of erotic desire and its relation to pleasure and pain, a process that the English word ‘bittersweet’ inverts; Short talks (1992), a collection of prose poems that were later included in Plainwater: essays and poetry (1995); and Glass, irony and God: essays and poetry (1995).

For Carson, essays and poems may be written in either prose or verse. Her writing shows a wide range of influences: the Greek texts she has spent her life studying; experimental writers, including Gertrude Stein and Italo Calvino; European surrealism; the Catholic mystics; and Chinese poetry. Dense with literary and cultural allusions, her work creates a timeless space in which Carson's own spiritual and emotional concerns can exist along with the trials of Emily Brontë (in ‘The glass essay’, a long poem about a failed love affair) or Bashōo's retreats from the world, which gloss her own pilgrimage through Spain in the rhapsodic ‘Kinds of water: an essay on the road to Compostela’. At heart an experimental religious writer, with a rich knowledge of the Christian mystic tradition as well as an interest in Eastern religions, metaphysics in general, and psychoanalysis, Carson addresses both worship and doubt, and the difficulties of living in a world of divine immanence. Her sympathies are for marginal figures—outsiders, isolatos, lovers, pilgrims, penitents, the ill, and the old. Whether she is recreating some of the violent contradictions in ancient Judaism in the powerful poem ‘Book of Isaiah’, or recounting her own dislocation during a trip to Rome in ‘The fall of Rome: a traveller's guide’, Carson remains a lapidary stylist, writing lyrical and reflective narratives of the pain of daily existence.

In 1996 Carson won the Lannan Literary Award, a $50,000 prize given by the Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles (the only other Canadian to win this award was Alice Munro). That a writer of Carson's importance should be almost unknown in her own country attests to the eccentricities of contemporary Canadian literary culture.

(See Mary di Michele, ‘Interview’, Matrix 49 (1996).)