Product Description

Simone Weil described “decreation” as “undoing the creature in us”–an undoing of self. In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson explores this idea with characteristic brilliance and a tantalizing range of reference, moving from Aphrodite to Antonioni, Demosthenes to Annie Dillard, Telemachos to Trotsky, and writing in forms as varied as opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, and rapture. As she makes her way through these forms she slowly dismantles them, and in doing so seeks to move through the self, to its undoing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #364869 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-10
• Released on: 2006-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 13 intricately related, supple and confident works in verse and prose, eminent poet and classicist Carson (Autobiography of Red) takes on the meaning and function of sleep; the art and attitudes of Samuel Beckett; the last days of an elderly mother; guns; a solar eclipse; "Longing, a Documentary"; the films of Michelangelo Antonioni; and the vexing, paradoxical projects of women mystics, among them Simone Weil and the medieval heretic Marguerite Porete. Porete, Sappho and others are subjects for brilliant prose essays. The volume's unusual length, though, comes mostly from one-act operas, closet dramas, and other work with stage or film components. "The Mirror of Simple Souls," a short opera and artist's book about Porete, already has an underground reputation: here it takes its place among other works for dramatic recital, including "Hunger Tango," "Stroke and Dye Aria" and a teasingly brief verse screenplay about Abelard, Heloïse and chickpeas. For all its variety, though, the strongest work in this strong collection may be the short, spiky, individual poems, which certainly provide the best single lines: "Your glassy wind breaks on a shoutless shore and stirs around the rose." (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Several years ago, Anne Carson told a reporter from the New York Times Magazine that she has no main themes as a writer: "I have no idea. Whatever I bump into I do. It's an act of impulse." The poet as a wandering, impulsive omnivore has long been a sturdy, off-the-rack sensibility, but it's one that doesn't really suit Carson. After all, in Decreation, her eighth book and first new one in five years, she once again finds herself writing about people, most often women, who pine for relief from longing and regret: the ancient Greek poet Sappho, the literary critic Longinus (whose treatise On the Sublime preserved a fragment of Sappho's "He seems to me equal to gods that man," a poem that's one of Carson's touchstones), the medieval French heretic Marguerite Porete, the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni and the writers Virginia Woolf and Simone Weil. Moreover, like most of Carson's previous books, Decreation is a hybrid in which various genres -- poetry, essay and drama -- bump into each other. Its mixture of genres and personalities makes the book at once fascinating and frustrating, intricate and slack. The title is taken from an essay by Weil, who defined "decreation" as "undoing the creature in us." The essay in which Carson elaborates on Weil's idea, "Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God," is the book's centerpiece and a companion of sorts to Carson's previously published essay about women in ancient Greece, "Putting Her in Her Place." Carson is drawn to selves who desire immersion and disintegration into an absolute inhuman essence (in the case of Porete and Weil, the essence is God). What's intriguing about her portrayal of this sensibility is the utter absence of melancholy. She doesn't say whether loss of the self is something any of these women try to stem or evade; instead, she focuses on the paradox of someone seeking self-affirmation in an experience of dispossession and dissolution. Carson's hybrid books have been praised for disintegrating the boundaries between prose and verse. But this praise has often been based on a mistaken assumption -- that cross-fertilization automatically occurs whenever different genres of writing appear between the covers of a single book. In Decreation, the juxtaposition of prose and verse has the opposite effect. Instead of disintegrating the differences between genres, it reinforces them. Going from verse to essay to drama, one can't help but notice that Carson's hand is surer, and her language sharper, in some genres more than others. Carson's poems sometimes contain a stirring line, image or allusion, but too often they are dulled by a dearth of music, a versified prosiness and formal gimmicks (such as eschewing the standard left-hand margin in favor of center alignment). With the exception of a series called "Gnosticisms," many of the poems in Decreation are like a borrowed home: lived in but never owned. The book's dramatic pieces are also a mixed bag. "Lots of Guns: An Oratorio for Five Voices" is in part an allegory of current political turmoil: Yes well I have no choice. Our temples are at stake. Our nutmeg is at stake. Once again it all comes down to nutmeg! God promised us that nutmeg is our truth. Other spices exist. That is not the point. I've lost track of the point. Further evidence of your sedition. This is amusing but a little too clever. And while the three-part opera "Decreation," about Aphrodite, Porete and Weil, quickly garnered acclaim after the second part was performed at the University of Michigan in 1999, on the page it sounds flat and ends up functioning as an appendix to the essay of the same name that precedes it. Carson has a speculative mind, and in "Decreation" and the book's three other essays it truly flourishes. Her approach in each essay is the same. After establishing her subject in a few sentences, she glosses the thoughts of three or four classical and modern writers on the chosen topic. Carson works by apposition, juxtaposing writers and ideas and demanding that the reader make chance calculations about the correspondences between them. In "Totality: The Color Of Eclipse," she begins by noting that the root of "eclipse" is the ancient Greek ekleipsis, "a forsaking, quitting, abandonment." From there she begins a short, lively survey of writers -- Herodotus, Pindar, Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard -- who have treated a total eclipse as an analogy for marriage. Carson doesn't pretend to chronicle the analogy's maturation over time or demonstrate how one writer's use of it is indebted to another's. Instead, she unpacks each analogy without overtly comparing them or drawing any conclusions, thereby creating an incongruous marriage of reflections about marriage. Prose is by definition pedestrian: One of the roots of the word "prose" is the Latin prosus, which means to move forward. In Decreation, thanks to the intellectual skips and gambols of her essays, Carson gamely tugs at and twists that root. John Palattella writes regularly about poetry for the Nation. Reviewed by John Palattella
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Count on Carson, brilliant and larky, to dance you out of the quotidian. A frolicsome and philosophical poet who channels voices both mythic and historical as she opens new portals onto the human psyche, Carson tinkers expertly with form and complex concepts in her ninth highly original book. Here are shaped lyrics that trace a troubled relationship between the narrator and her mother, an oratorio, a libretto, and an archly minimalist screenplay about Heloise and Abelard. Carson is at her electrifying best when she pairs incisive essays with piercing poems to explore the magical properties of sleep, to explicate the sublime with help from the first-century Greek critic Longinus and filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, and to grapple with "spiritual daring." The latter inspires commanding portraits of three poetic women martyrs--Sappho; Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in Paris, 1310; and Simone Weil, who declared, "We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves." Carson's inquiry into the paradoxical "decreation" of the self in the quest for the divine exemplifies her gift for joining erudition with feeling, insight with wit, and a sense of cosmic continuity with personal liberation. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Intelligence Has No Other Name
Intelligence has no other name than Anne Carson. And "Decreation" proves that Ms. Carson has not lost the good of intellect as she pursues an incomphrehensible sublime through the intricate paths that connect the uber-sublime Simone Weil, Margerate Porete, Longinus, the negative theology of Samuel Beckett, and a thousand other things, themes, and people. Though not all of the pieces in this volume are verse all are pure poetry shifting through an intense tesseract where things that are most traditional are radically re-interpreted in direction that is surreal, avant-garde, and yet classical.
This kind of work is an example of what strong poets should be attempting to do today and it is one reason why Ms. Carson is the brightest bard of our hour, worthy to stand on the heights with Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan.
As I read these poems and essays I feel that my own imagination and intellect are struck by a light that is feminine and precise, strong, even rutheless, breath taking in its wilful ascents and descents, and firmly dedicated to its own unique spiritual quest.
There are passages in the poems in which I encountered the truly indescribable. Few are the poets these days that will dare to take on such possiblities and labors. Most poets writing are grinding out stuff that sounds like the slightly piqued pseudo-spiritual musings of third-rate diarists. But not Ms. Carson.
I must confess I can hardly wait for her next volume but for now I have too much to ponder as I watch my own mind quietly re-organized by Anne Carson's on-going aesthetic triumphs.

Outlaw time with Anne Carson
Decreation is coy, playful, obscure, difficult & profound. In other words - it is experimental, like other works by Anne Carson. Where is the tiny give that begins to give you entry? The book is transparent - yes, but slippery (note the undergarment photographed like a jellyfish on the cover). In the book are tableaus of different approaches to annihilation featuring Sam Beckett and God, Marguerite Porete and God, Simone Weil and God. In the interludes, witness Sokrates and Demosthenes the orator "who knows how to make his nouns rain like blows", Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bishop together in a sleep-assay that describes To the Lighthouse as a "novel that falls asleep in the middle". Decreation also contains an hommage to Antonioni, as strange and beautiful as Antonioni's films. Perhaps the "give" you're looking for is on page 46, where Carson recounts Antonioni directing Lucia Bose in Story of a Love Affair - "To obtain the results I wanted I had to use insults, abuse, hard slaps." Then again maybe not. But just when you think you're in here's another clue from AC - "If God were knowable, why would we believe in him?" Slap!

Exquisite, Brilliant, Intriguing!
Everyone should read this book! It examines Simone Weil, Stevens, and other Modern and Contemporary Poets.

I adore this book.

"Nothing that is not there and
THE nothing that is."

Beautiful, moving, thrilling, lucid and sublime.