Nox Pdf Summary Reviews By Anne Carson

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Nox Pdf Summary

Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry.

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Nox Review

Emily Whitman

5.0 out of 5 stars ‘night, Brother
Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2010

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“No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history.”

More an experience than a read, “Nox” by Anne Carson splices abstraction–definitions, quotations, lessons in ancient Greek history–with the concrete specificity of family photographs, handwritten letters, and personal recollections that attempt to contain a fragile and fragmented relationship. Carson’s brother, who led a transitory and difficult life, has died in Copenhagen. And now Carson, in the manner of Catallus (poem 101), must go to see her brother’s widow, the city where he lived, and the church he was brought to when he died. In words and images, and in words as images, Carson creates a landscape that mirrors memory–a continuous accordion-folded page that backdrops black and white snapshots, yellowing letters, cancelled stamps, and cut-out text. Most striking are the photos that include shadows, and texts that Carson repeats, strikes out, or blurs. Also haunting is the way this collage seems so very real on the reproduced page: edges of paper-on-paper look sharp and true, or wrinkled from too much glue; staples seem raised, shiny and cold; even the reverse-embossing of handwriting forces this reader to touch and expect to feel the raised imprint of a ball-point pen, as if, in feeling, the question is asked: is this real?

Carson explains, “History and elegy are akin.” In questioning, “are these staples real?” or “who was this brother?” we share in the act of asking, of composing the story and creating history. In her distilled and disjointed–yet accessible–way, Carson compels questions, collects facts–or shards of them–and assembles a beautiful, tactile, white-space filled elegy that honors a brother who, later in life, she barely knew. “You have survived it, ” Carson writes, “and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.” Carson has fashioned a thing that carries itself, a work of poetry and prose that stands on its own as book and non-book, object and message: an account of one’s life as an extraordinary ordinary thing.

An Ordinary Man in New Haven

5.0 out of 5 stars Her glory. If only . .
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2018

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I adore Anne Carson. She may well be our (the English language’s) most compelling (insert “greatest” if you will) living poet. And I believe that NOX is (so far – hint hint) her masterwork.

Poets must be in their essential being lateral above vertical thinkers. And she is supreme. All enters in, yet all belongs. And even a modestly attentive reader will easily be drawn in, and across and into their own thinking, their own lives.

However, my “review” is mostly an entreaty. To Anne Carson, to New Directions. Though I completely understand the necessity of the folding structure of this work, I long for a “reading copy”. A paperback – even, heaven help us, a Kindle edition – so that I might more easily take it with me when I go . . . even a very small formatted paperback I could stick in my pocket, as readers used to do in the OLD DAYS.

I need this work as a book to be with me, in addition to its marvelous place on my desk, ready to be unfolded . . . but only there with plenty of room to do so.

About Anne Carson Author Of Nox pdf Book

Anne Carson Author Of Nox pdf Book is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.

Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.