Notes from Source: Like those other three collections, Decreation is a mixed bag of a book, and probably the weakest of the lot. Along with [Anne Carson]’s usual startling twists, turns, and tartness, it contains some pathos and bathos, and even a few scrapings from the bottom of the barrel: Anne Carson doing Anne Carson with one hand behind her back doing something else perhaps. Bad as it sometimes gets-and this book contains the worst thing that Carson has ever published, Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts-the book is mostly fairly good, preferring to offend by taking risks than to bore with more (yawn) of the same. The new book after all has as its epigraph John Florio’s rendering of a sentence from Montaigne’s “Sur des verses de Virgile”: “I love a poetical kinde of a march, by friskes, skips, and jumps.” And Carson plays the Montaignesque role, frequently stooping to splash readers with “incongruous ideas” from “the queer pool of [her] mind” (to quote an aside from “Totality: The Colour of Eclipse”). Mostly the effect is refreshing-the frisks keep the reader on her toes, and the splashes are generally bracing, as in the book’s opening poem, “Sleepchains”: After the fine start called “Stops”, Carson treats her readers to one of her usual essays-“Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)”. Relying on the juxtapositions and ellipses not of Pound, but of tired old academic New Historicism, “Every Exit” hops into the prose sack with Homer and Woolf and Elizabeth Bishop and Socrates and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and manages to make them all seem like pretty dull bedfellows. The book’s two later essays”Totality: The Colour of Eclipse” and Decreation: How Women like [Sappho], [Marguerite Porete] and [Simone Weil] Tell God-are fortunately much better, and in addition offer oblique insights into Carson’s own pared-down poetics. So too does the compelling Q&A session called “Quad”, a concise meditation on Beckett which also tells her readers what she is about. “[I]s there a plot,” “Quad” asks, answering thus: “To keep moving at all times and not touch the hole at the center of the thinness.” “[S]imply a game,” runs a subsequent question: “I do not find games simple” comes the tart answer. Mixed amongst the good as well as the fair-to-middling pieces are the ugly and the bad: “Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin”, “Lots of Guns: An Oratorio for Five Voices”, and “H & A Screenplay”. The Goodwin poem is an “iffy” theme-and-variations response to a painting that remains uncompellingly disjunctive, and is also full of pointless (as opposed to poetic) non sequiturs. Explicitly inspired by Gertrude Stein, “Guns” only manages to confirm the (misleading) stereotype of Stein as a dotty old charlatan (and as for the piece’s contribution to the North-American debate over guns, no comment). “H & A Screenplay”, which might well have been called “Abelard Asshole and Hurtin’ Heloise”, manages to turn two extraordinary human beings into ideological puppets in the sex and gender wars, and is not redeemed even by its occasional comedy: the moment, for example, when the police startle the intellectual lovers in their parked car, ruining their tête-à-tête (like [Geoffrey Hill], Carson can sometimes be funny, but laughing aloud might spoil the more general air of portentousness that pervades their work).

Further Notes: Place: Toronto Publisher: Canadian Review of Books Ltd