Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson

Men in the Off Hours

Anne Carson

This poetry collection includes some prose and I found it a demanding read. The collection as a whole comes over as surreal and the fact that I did not understand all the references made it more so. Among other things she puts Virginia Woolf and Thucydides together on the film set of 'The Peloponnesian War' and considers how television distorts our view of events.

Extract

is the ease with which it accepts
that what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error,
the wilful creation of error,
the deliberate break and complication of mistakes
out of which may arise
unexpectedness.

From Essay on What I Think About Most

Parallels
  • Anthropology by Dan Rhodes
  • Heading Inland by Nicola Barker