O Brother, Where Art Thou?

T.S Eliot might have been thinking of Anne Carson when he suggested that “only those [writers] who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.” Of course, going too far often entails out-running one’s readers and being dismissed as too experimental or elitist. On the evidenceof her last two creative books, Decreation and Nox, these issues do not seem to trouble Anne Carson’s muse, which ranges across a remarkable array of forms and styles, draws on the entire western tradition and engages Sappho as amicably as Marguerite Porete (who?) and Jean-Luc Godard. Nox is the latest in a series of usually unclassifiable books that have established her as one of the most original, ambitious, unpredictably inventive, exciting and wildly uneven writers of her generation. She writes on the passport-free border between literature and philosophy where Sappho, Emily Brontë and Eliot sit in the Café Mitwelt discussing “Die Angst offenbart...