The Beauty of the Husband

"I think Anne Carson is one of the most startling original contemporary voices in poetry and if you’ve ever heard her read it is the most extraordinary experience. She’s amazing and I love The Beauty of the Husband . It’s very unconventional as a poetry collection because it’s actually a novel. She’s devised her own idiosyncratic structuring principle which is the tango, the dance. She tells the story of a divorce in what she calls 29 tangos. It’s utterly compelling: every time I read it I can’t put it down. She’s got that novelist’s knack of making you turn the page and at the same time there is such radiant poetic language. I think it’s a brilliant book. Really? That’s so unexpected, I think she has so many narrative talents that other poets don’t have. I’m just opening it up: there’s such a mixture of different things. It’s a hybrid art form, she has massively long line lengths and really short ones and she has quotes. Not that difficult because there’s no obvious imposed poetic form. It reads very like prose. You get the drama from the pauses and the different line lengths and the tiny stanzas followed by the longer ones. In some ways it’s easy just to read straight through because there isn’t any of that overt poetic form cluttering it up. It’s deeply weird; some of her titles are confusing, which could turn people off, and it’s extremely sexual – all her stuff is. She is very much concerned with the sexual and sexuality. Yes, with lots of classical references. She’s a classics professor and I heard a lecture she gave once on Sappho’s fragments and it was amazing. She’s very interested in what constitutes an aesthetic object as well. I think she deliberately fractures things in lots of different ways to see if they still cohere. Oh yes, she is, definitely."