Yes, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds--and minor poets. The major ones tend to operate in a trough-and-peak pattern, producing a dozen lesser works for every masterpiece. Still, Anne Carson pushes this tendency to extremes, and nowhere more markedly than in Men in the Off Hours, which contains some of the best and worst lyrics of her entire career.

First, the good news: Nobody has written more acutely about perception--about the chaotic collision of our senses with the real world--since the glory days of Wallace Stevens. Not that Carson echoes the airborne rhetoric of her great predecessor. Her fractured, zigzagging lines deliberately avoid the kind of gravity that was his trademark, and she likes to deflect the grand manner by ratcheting her diction upward (into Delphic utterance) or downward (into baby talk, if the baby happens to be Gertrude Stein). Still, like Stevens, she makes us think about how we think. She dislikes any attempt to remove cognition from its rustling Heraclitean framework. No wonder she ends up scolding taxidermy freak John James Audubon, whose point-and-shoot portraiture rubs her the wrong way: "In the salons of Paris and Edinburgh // where he went to sell his new style / this Haitian-born Frenchman / lit himself // as a noble rustic American / wired in the cloudless poses of the Great Naturalist. / They loved him // for the 'frenzy and ecstasy' / of true American facts." We comprehend things only in flux and, as Carson explains in "Essay on What I Think About Most," by mistake: ...what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error,
the willful creation of error,
the deliberate break and complication of mistakes
out of which may arise
unexpectedness. Now for the bad news: Men in the Off Hours includes too ample a serving of Carson's weaker, semiprecious work--short lyrics in which she bends over backwards for an antipoetic poetic effect (if such a thing is possible). "Epitaph: Europe" is precisely the kind of freeze-dried surrealism she should avoid. And the spitballs this classicist fires at television in a piece like "TV Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War" are truly puzzling. Why blame the tube for our cultural sins, particularly when the average NYPD Blue rerun contains more experiential fiber than most contemporary poetry? Still, Carson's blazing successes easily overshadow her failures. And those who have found her too recondite, too forbidding, need only take a look at the concluding poem, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." This elegy to the poet's mother is touching, emotionally direct, and completely original: an instant (to use a phrase Carson would probably loathe) classic. --James Marcus

From Publishers Weekly
Carson's demanding style has been among the decade's most intriguing: critics with little else in common look forward to her inimitable and argumentative poems. Carson made her last splash with the narrative poem Autobiography of Red. This follow-up volume of short poems incorporates a brace of unusual genres--quick verse-essays, epitaphs and epigrams, predictions and "oracles," pseudo-bibliographical "drafts" and "fragments," verse-portraits (the Biblical Lazarus, a circus "Flatman"), invented proverbs, and extremely free translations. (One of several amazing versions of Catullus begins "Before my holy stoning in the wet kisses and the smell of sperm/ I drove an ambulance for the Red Cross.") Like her previous work, these poems draw frequently on Carson's classical training (she teaches Greek and Latin at McGill University in Montreal). Her harsh, carved lines, clear closures and periphrases can sound like attempts to forge an English answer to Greek lyric. The opening "Epitaph: Zion" initiates readers into the sudden twists, astonishments and mysteries in the longer work to follow: the whole poem reads: "Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives/ Were fragile, the wind/ Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather/ Who drank a bowl of elsewhere." Potential keys to many poems reside in two brisk, scholarly prose essays at the beginning and near the end--"Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War" and "Dirt and Desire: Female Pollution in Antiquity." Woolf reappears in the poems as a principle of inner experience and subjective time, Thucydides as the opposing principle of linear time, narrative, action, event. Carson's other new works invoke, describe and quote Hokusai, Audobon, Tolstoy, Augustine, Edward Hopper, Akhmatova and Artaud; it is the measure of Carson's striking talent that the men and women in her lines sound, at base, always and only like her. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Canadian Carson roared onto the American poetry scene in 1998 with Autobiography of Red, a National Book Critics Circle nominee. Her new book, also an NBCC nominee, exhibits the same intellectual rigor, polished verse, and depth of knowledge of her previous efforts. Carson, a classics professor, makes bold references to everyone from Oedipus to Akhamatova, but the effect of these astute, gemlike little poems is less a history lesson than a challenging conversation in a sunlit garden. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Calvin Bedient
She has great intellectual and emotional knowledge, a vast habitat, to every bit of which she brings powerful perception and a freshness as startling as a loud knock at the door.

From Booklist
A classicist with a zestful sense of humor and a disciple of Dickinson, Carson peoples her springy poems and poetic prose pieces with writers and artists of the past. She pairs up Thucydides and Woolf in a musing on war and history that launches her central theme, an inquiry into how we tell time. Quirky epitaphs mark the passing of life. Homage is paid to Catullus in a lithe and witty cycle, then Carson creates another strange duo by combining meditations on the luminous yet lonely paintings of Edward Hopper (in which time stands still) with timeless excerpts from Augustine's Confessions. This startling series ends with a resonant query: "For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it?" Carson then explores the nature of cinematic and video time in agile and imaginative poems that document the make-believe filming of movie variations on the lives of Artaud, Tolstoy, Lazarus ("Lazarus Take 2!"), Akhmatova, and Catherine Deneuve. Brilliant and irrepressible, Carson takes liberties with high irony and deep emotion. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
Elaborately and often successfully innovative, this sixth book by classical scholar and poet Carson proves that poets love to play not only with the textures and meanings of words, but also with syntax, sound, diction, line, punctuation, form, and even genre. Part prose, yet mostly poetry, this is an extravagant collection of treatises and experiments, generally on the theme of metaphor (which Carson defines in a poem ironically entitled ``Essay on What I Think about Most''). Creating metaphor (i.e., saying a thing is something it's not) ``causes the mind to experience itself / in the act of making a mistake.'' Yet metaphors ``teach the mind / to enjoy error / and to learn / from the juxtaposition of WHAT IS and WHAT IS NOT the case.'' Such juxtapositions (and not merely verbal ones) fascinate Carson. She often unites incongruous figures or conceptsVirginia Woolf and Thucydides, Edward Hopper and St. Augustine, television and Tolstoyin order to force from each some hidden nonpareil. Like Sappho (whom she scrutinizes in ``Dirt and Desire''), Carson ``plays havoc with boundaries and defies the rules.'' Her diction is inventive (``whitely Septembered,'' ``Praguing the eye''), her syntax often unusual (``Now the mind isn't she an avid previous hobo?''). Poems packed with one-word lines and sentences with abandoned punctuation force the reader to confront the extraordinariness of words themselves, though Carson is interested in more than just renewing the power of language. However experimental her means, she produces powerful literature marked by humor, sensuality, spirituality, and poignancy. Complex, yet surprisingly and enormously readable.-- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"Carson's reputation has soared to a level equal to that of the half-dozen most admired contemporary American poets."–The New York Times Book Review

Review
"Carson's reputation has soared to a level equal to that of the half-dozen most admired contemporary American poets."?The New York Times Book Review

Book Description
Anne Carson has been acclaimed by her peers as the most imaginative poet writing today. In a recent profile, The New York Times Magazine paid tribute to her amazing ability to combine the classical and the modern, the mundane and the surreal, in a body of work that is sure to endure.

In Men in the Off Hours, Carson offers further proof of her tantalizing gifts. Reinventing figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon, Carson sets up startling juxtapositions: Lazarus among video paraphernalia, Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war, Edward Hopper paintings illuminated by St. Augustine. And in a final prose poem, she meditates movingly on the recent death of her mother. With its quiet, acute spirituality and its fearless wit and sensuality, Men in the Off Hours shows us a fiercely individual poet at her best.

From the Publisher
"Brilliant and irrepressible, Carson takes liberties with high irony and deep emotion."-- Booklist
"Immediate, intimate, and astute...Read this book now, and you'll have the pleasure of knowing that you were present at the arrival of a truly great poet of the 21st century."-- Time Out
"Carson's demanding style has been among the decade's most intriguing: critics with little else in common look forward to her inimitable and argumentative poems...Incorporates a brace of unusual genres--quick verse-essays, epitaphs and epigrams, predictions and 'oracles,' pseudo-bibliographical 'drafts' and 'fragments,' verse-portraits (the Biblical Lazarus, a circus 'Flatman'), invented proverbs, and extremely free translations...Striking."-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Everything welcomes Carson, she welcomes everything. . . The most instantly penetrating of contemporary poets, she's a principle of vividness visited worldsharp upon the world. She goes at once to where the living is . . . There's good reason that Carson's reputation has soared to that of the half-dozen most admired contemporary American (sic.) poets. She's tremendously gifted and, without lowering standards, often writes in a middle range between philosophy and lyricism, where many can find her. At the same time, she has a great intellectual and emotional knowledge, a vast habitat, to every bit of which she brings powerful perception and a freshness as startling as a loud knock at the door."--Calvin Bedient, New York Times Book Review
                                

From the Inside Flap
Anne Carson has been acclaimed by her peers as the most imaginative poet writing today. In a recent profile, The New York Times Magazine paid tribute to her amazing ability to combine the classical and the modern, the mundane and the surreal, in a body of work that is sure to endure.

In Men in the Off Hours, Carson offers further proof of her tantalizing gifts. Reinventing figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon, Carson sets up startling juxtapositions: Lazarus among video paraphernalia, Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war, Edward Hopper paintings illuminated by St. Augustine. And in a final prose poem, she meditates movingly on the recent death of her mother. With its quiet, acute spirituality and its fearless wit and sensuality, Men in the Off Hours shows us a fiercely individual poet at her best.

From the Back Cover
"One of the most innovative poets writing today."–Seattle Weekly

About the Author
Anne Carson is the Director of Graduate Studies, Classics, at McGill University. She is the recipient of many awards, including the QSPELL A.M. Klein Poetry Prize, the 1996 Lannan Award, the 1997 Pushcart Prize, and a McArthur Fellowship.

FROM THE PUBLISHER