Notes from Source: The detached voice in contemporary poetry demands attention. It reflects a stay against the complex, paralyzing contradictions of life. There is a progression of detachment, an increasing withdrawal of self into the pure act of seeing. Some might ask, how else to respond to the perceived, spinning vacuum at the core of the cosmos? In the multiple, dissolving planes of Anne Carson’s poetry–at her most playful, tantalizingly out of reach–we come upon a trajectory that is emblematic, if not definitive of the age.