17. Von Sappho und Woolf inspiriert: Anne Carson

What Walden Pond was to Thoreau, what the sea was to Conrad and Melville, what seeing is to John Berger, Greek and Latin are to Anne Carson: an immense space—because the words now contain the world that once existed around them—that allows her imagination a measureless boundary. Carson wrote her first few books, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Plainwater (1995), and Glass, Irony and God (1995), with the brio of one who had sighted an undiscovered country where imagination could renew itself and break free of the well-trodden territories that have served, tragically, to marginalize poetry (an art that sulks like Achilles when it is cut off from an active readership). / Mark Rudman, Bookforum

DECREATION: POETRY, ESSAYS, OPERA BY ANNE CARSON. NEW YORK: KNOPF. 272 PAGES. $25.