Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera | 
|  | | | Title: | Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera | | Author: | Anne Carson | | Publisher: | Knopf | | Type: | Book / Hardcover | | Publication Date: | 06 September, 2005 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 1400043492 / 9781400043491 | | List Price: | $24.95 | | You Save: | $5.99 | | Amazon Price: | $18.96 | |
 This book is also available, brand-new, from 3rd-party marketplace sellers at Amazon.com, from $18.96. |
The HTML code below can be pasted onto your web-site, your MySpace page, or blog - or any number of similar places - to create a link to this page: If, instead of a text link, you'd like to create a link to this page which will display the book cover, if it's available, then the code below will do exactly that:
Check for the same book at these other US book sites:
• [ Abebooks ] • [ Alibris ] • [ Barnes & Noble ] • [ Half.com ] • [ Powells ] … or check UK bookstores
| Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson contemplates “decreation”–an activity described by Simone Weil as “undoing the creature in us”–an undoing of self. But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its definition? Where else can we start?
Anne Carson’s Decreation starts with form–the undoing of form. Form is various here: opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, rapture. The undoing is tender, but tenderness can change everything, or so the author appears to believe.
| Other Items You May Enjoy:
Browse Books From These Related Subjects:
Customer Reviews:
• Outlaw Time With Anne Carson 25 June, 2006
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!
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2KB0Z0Q3XVRJP
• Exquisite, Brilliant, Intriguing! 17 November, 2008
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1YQMM8MJHUQG3
• Intelligence Has No Other Name 01 November, 2005
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AJ57K3QG32CNK
|
