Product Description

A collection of poems blending the modern and the classical. The Canadian author's subjects range from Sylvia Plath to Franz Kafka, and from waterproofing to walking backwards. A long poem, "The Glass Essay", deals with the end of a contemporary love affair but is haunted by the Bronte sisters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #439812 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 143 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
For her first British publication, the Canadian poet Anne Carson has chosen to collect five sequences combining modern and classical themes, "short talks" and theological allegory. Glass and God opens with the moving long poem, "The Glass Essay", a series of meditations on the tensions between the public and private life of Emily Brontë, as well as her own sense of loneliness and despair after the ending of a love affair.

Reflecting on the intense, obsessional, even demented, anger of Brontë's private, imaginary life, Carson sees an analogue between that life and the lives, more generally, of women artists caught between the demands of love and work, belief and unbelief. She wonders whether "anger could be a kind of vocation for some women", embodying what they both hate and fear about themselves, acting as a powerful source for both the release of repressed energy and revenge for "that life withheld". Even though "the vocation of anger is not mine", Carson's indication is that anger, despite its unnerving presence, can be a profound emotion for freeing "this soul trapped in glass". Other poems address the costs of such exorcism, of what it means to purge one's spiritual and psychological demons when there is still "the terrible sex price to pay".--David Marriott