Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red (Vintage, 1999), fourth and final selection

Here is my last selection of favourite passages from this outstanding book:


...fifty red parrots dove and roared
like a conscious waterfall.

*

The Pacific at night is red
and gives off a soot of desire.

from "XXXVII. Eyewitnesses"

Enormous pools of a moment kept opening around his hands

each time he tried to move them.

from "XL. Photographs: Origin of Time"

...a light so brilliant it feels cold and hot at once.

from "XLI. Photographs: Jeats"

In the photograph the face of

Herakles is white. It is the face

of an old man. It is a photograph of the future, thought Geryon months later when he

was standing in his darkroom

looking down at the acid bath and watching likeness come groping out of the bones.

from "XLV. Photographs: Like and Not Like"

This is a memory of our

beauty.

from "XLVI. Photographs: #1748"

We are amazing beings,

Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.

And now time is rushing towards them

where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,

night at their back.

from "XLVII. The Flashes in Which a Man

Possesses Himself"

In the UK, you can buy Autobiography of Red from Hive here. 

Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red (Vintage, 1999), third selection

Some more favourite passages from this amazing book:


The pimiento stung his mouth alive like sudden sunset.

*

You eat like my daughter. With a certain
shall I say lucidity.

*

Black outside air tossed itself
hard against the windows.

*

Oh don't go, thought Geryon who felt himself starting
to slide off the surface of the room
like an olive off a plate. When the plate attained an angle of thirty degrees
he would vanish into his own blankness.

*

And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness.

from "XXX. Distances"

Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the street.

Little rackety wind went by.

Moon gone. Sky shut. Night had delved deep.

*

He could see the harbor blackly glittering. Cobblestones grew slick. Smell of salt fish

and latrines furred the air.

*

Hardly glancing

at one another the three of them played

as one person, in a state of pure discovery. They tore clear and clicked and locked

and unlocked, they shot

their eyebrows up and down. They leaned together and wove apart, they rose 

and cut away and stalked

one another and flew up in a cloud and sank back down on waves.

*

Black night sky weighed starlessly on the windows.

*

The petals of their colognes rose around them in a light terror. 

from "XXXI. Tango"

...the elevator crashed like a mastodon within its hollow cage.

from "XXXII. Kiss"

Ancash sat very straight,

a man as beautiful as a live feather.

*

Soon they were out on the street

walking fast along Avenida Bolívar with a hard wind strumming their bodies. 

*

A winter sun had thrown its bleak wares on the sky

and people going past

looked dazzled.

from "XXXIV. Harrods"

In the UK, you can buy Autobiography of Red from Hive, supporting local independent shops, here. 

Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red (Vintage, 1999), second selection

Up on the overpass
the night was wide open
and blowing headlights like a sea. He stood against the wind and let it peel him
clean.

from "XVII. Walls"

...a night suddenly gone solid.

from "XVIII. She"

...Geryon

caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn.

from "XX. AA"

Each morning a shock

to return to the cut soul.

*

Outside the natural world was enjoying

a moment of total strength. Wind rushed over the ground like a sea and battered up

into the corners of the buildings,

garbage cans went dashing down the alley after their souls.

from "XXIII. Water"

Geryon's life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.

*

...Geryon's

whole body formed one arch of a cry--upcast to that custom, the human custom

of wrong love.

from "XXIV. Freedom"

As the aeroplane moved over the frozen white flatland of the clouds Geryon left

his life behind like a weak season.

*

Geryon closed his eyes and listened to engines vibrating deep in the moon-splashed

canals of his brain.

*

Outside a bitten moon rode fast over a tableland of snow.

from "XXVI. Aeroplane"

A cold spray

of fear shot across his lungs. 

*

Four of the roses were on fire.

They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets

and howling colossal intimacies

from the back of their fused throats.

*

He moved off into the tragicomedy of the crowd.

from "XXVI. Mitwelt"

Pulling his body after him

like a soggy mattress Geryon trudged on uphill.

from "XXVIII. Skepticism"

Sunset begins early in winter, a bluntness at the edge of the light.

*

Geryon paused in his listening and saw the slopes of time spin backwards and stop.

*

It was the hour when the snow goes blue

and streetlights come on and a hare may

pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book.

*

His eye traveled to the clock at the front of the room and he fell into the pool

of his favorite question.

from "XXIX. Slopes"

In the UK, you can buy Autobiography of Red from Hive, supporting local independent shops, here. 

Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse by Anne Carson (Vintage, 1999), first selection

A first selection of favourite passages from this wonderful book:



He clothed himself in this strong word each. 

*

Before this time Geryon had not lived nights just days and their red intervals. 

* 

Facts are bigger in the dark.

from "II. Each"

...said his mother

rhinestoning past on her way to the door. She had all her breasts on this evening.

*

She was standing before him now

smiling hard and rummaging in his face with her eyes.

from "III. Rhinestones"

They grinned at each other as night climbed ashore.

from "IV. Tuesday"

Then he met Herakles and all the kingdoms of his life shifted down a few notches.

They were two superior eels

at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

*

The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.

from "VII. Change"

Her voice drew a circle

around all the years he had spent in this room.

*

A pure bold longing to be gone filled him.

from "IX. Space and Time"

He understood 

that people need

acts of attention from one another, does it really matter which acts?

*

His voice washed

Geryon open.

from "X. Sex Questions"

He could feel the house of sleepers

around him like loaves on shelves.

*

...and a fragment of human voice tore itself out and came past, it seemed

already long ago, trailing

a bad dust of its dream which touched his skin.

from "XII. Lava"

As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.

from "XVI. Grooming"

In the UK, you can buy Autobiography of Red from Hive here.

Plainwater by Anne Carson (Cape, 1995)

I didn't include any selections from the first section here as they work as brilliant versions of the original Mimnermus fragments. Perhaps I should reconsider. Anyway, here are my favourite passages elsewhere in the manuscript.


From Part II, Short Talks:

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

the end of "Introduction"

Rembrandt wakens you just in time to see matter stumble out of its forms.

the end of "On the End"

From Part III, Canicula di Anna:

The fact that Anna is somewhere 

having coffee or a dream

is an assault on me.

I hate these moments of poverty.

*

Sound

that shines up as a laugh

and smells like blood

is another troublesome,

ancient

category.

From Part V, The Anthropology of Water:


...the only rule of travel is, Don't come back the way you went.

*

It would be an almost perfect love affair, wouldn't it? that between the pilgrim and the road. No mistake, it is a beautiful thing, the camino. It stretches away from you. It leads to real gold. Look at the way it shines. And it asks only one thing. Which happens to be the thing you long to give. You step forward. You shiver in the light. Nothing is left in you but the desire for perfect economy of action, using up the whole heart, no residue, no mistake: camino. 

*

...you drop through a freedom so clear it is simply pain.

*

Shapes of life change as we look at them, change us for looking.

*

What are we made of but hunger and rage? 

*

How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal.

*

An entrance is important to a pilgrim: there can be only one.

*

No photographs--you know what fireworks are like. Tawdry, staggering, irresistible, like human love.

*

If we strain thought clear of impulse slowly, slowly the day scream subsides to ordered lust.

*

...a sun-drilled enormity of meadow....

*

I try to maintain a remote demeanour amid stunning self-accusations.

*

...little cats go clicking over the snow.




You can order Plainwater from Abe Books here.

Anne Carson's Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995)

...Sokrates
opens his--

eyes stacked with the motions of roses in that other dawn
and a torn coolness--

reluctantly.


*

Pale dawn was filling up the lap of the room.

from "TV Men: Sokrates"

You dove once

into your privatest presentiment

and stayed, face down in your black overcoat.
To my wonder.
Endlessness runs in you like leaves on the tree of night.
To live here one must forget much.

the end of "TV Men: The Sleeper"

XXIV.

A stranger is poor, voracious and turbulent.

He comes

from nowhere in particular

and pushes prices up.

His method of knowing

is to eat it. 

*

XXX.

A stranger is master of nothing.

Who in a nightmare

can help himself?

*

XXXIII.

Rome collapsed when Alaric ran out the dawn side. 

from "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide"

Lapping at Isaiah's ears black birdsong no it was anger.

*

The nation stirred in its husk and slept again. 

*

It was a cold winter evening, the cold bit like a wire. 

*

He slept, the asters in the garden unloaded their red thunder into the dark.

from "The Book of Isaiah"

Anne Carson's 'The Glass Essay' (1995)

Some favourite passages from Anne Carson's long poem, 'The Glass Essay,' from Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995):


Spring opens like a blade there. 

*

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?

*

Each morning a vision came to me.
Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul.

I called them Nudes.

*

                               By now I was so cold
it felt like burning.

*

But by now the day is wide open and a strange young April light
is filling the moor with gold milk.
I have reached the middle

where the ground goes down into a depression and fills with swampy water.
It is frozen.
A solid black pane of moor life caught in its own night attitudes.

*

It is a two-way traffic,

the language of the unsaid.

*

The April light is clear as an alarm.

As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object
existing in space on its own shadow.
I wish I could carry this clarity with me

into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce.

*

His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage

and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air.

*

Sunlight flocks through the room.

*

He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong,

but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone house--
except the hands. The hands keep growing.

*

I stared at the back of her head waiting for what she would say.
Her answer would clear this up.

But she just laughed a strange laugh with ropes all over it.

*

Those nights lying alone
are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn.
This is who I am.