Notes from Source: Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) is a multi-form double elegy in memory of the poet’s brother, Michael, and of an elegiac precursor to Catullus’s “Elegy no. 101.” While Nox’s uniquely monumental form has invited analyses particularly by scholars of media studies and book history, this article focuses instead on Nox’s conceptualization at the intersection of elegy and epitaph. I argue that Nox’s peculiar contribution to contemporary elegy arises from its merging of the long poem elegy with the epitaph, resulting in a poetics of loss that is at once expansive and economical. As such, Nox embodies the paradox of an epitaph in long verse form, a form marked by a unique style of ironic economic rationalism. Further, I argue that Nox requires reading strategies that take into account both its materiality as a textual artefact and its simultaneous excess of that materiality, insofar as it can be read as a further unfolding from earlier phases of Carson’s work with elegy and epitaph, especially Economy of the Unlost (1999).

Further Notes: Publisher: University of Toronto Press