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(More customer reviews)"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.
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