12/16/2019
It is a hallmark of Carson’s style to leave the juxtaposition of two cultural entities unexplained. The latest stirring verse play by Carson (Nox ) takes this practice to its extreme, crafting its title (and only) character by overlaying Marilyn Monroe and Euripides’s Helen, who went to Egypt during the Trojan War and was replaced in Troy by an illusion: “I never went to Troy, that was a cloud, don’t forget this,” she declares. Carson doesn’t attempt to create direct correlations, but rather compresses two women who both entranced the world to study loneliness, motherhood, and the motivations and costs of war in the process: “Hell smells stale. Fights aren’t about anything, fights are about themselves.” Carson wades through the implications of certain Greek words, generating some of her signature lyricism: “Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks,” she writes in “History of War: Lesson 3.” While readers will find themselves more readily oriented if they have some familiarity with both Monroe and the Euripidean Helen—especially when Norma Jeane’s daughter Hermione appears, having overdosed, to mark the distance between the two women’s lives—those willing to follow Carson will be rewarded with her ability to conjure a sentence and character beyond any illusion. (Feb.)
"There’s a long tradition of using original epics as the departure point for new texts that foreground minor characters in their antecedents. Carson has been writing into the cracks of the classical corpus her whole career, but in this book she is partially following in the footsteps of HD’s Helen in Egypt , itself a modernist epic poem. Carson places Marilyn Monroe alongside Helen of Troy and investigates the incendiary, nation-shaking potential of sex appeal."
The Guardian - Stephanie Sy-Quia
"This book fuses poetry, fun Greek history lexicon lessons, Helen, and Marilyn. 'War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don't.//Both carry wounds.' Delicious couplets. There are dancers who have internalized the music to such a high vibration that they no longer fit into a strict categorization for what they do. They weave with the music in an ancient alien way. Anne Carson brings intergalactic musical moves to the written page. 'Hermione it’s me, hello hello hello hello hello.' I dare you to get to that line and not ache. How does an artist write this way? Brilliance and cherries light her stage"
Literati Bookstore - Young Eun Yook
"There’s no other writer that can present such demands on a feather pillow for the reader, fuse erudition with insights so fluidly, and naturalize unorthodoxy in a manner preserving stylistic originality with timeless thought."
"There is a stark awareness nowadays that we need new ways of thinking about female icons like Helen or Marilyn Monroe, new ways to revolve the traditional male version of such events 360 degrees and find different, deeper sorrows there."
"This little grenade of a book is difficult to categorize. It's a performance piece and a treatise on war and beauty, reality and fakery, bombshell and bombing—with ancient Greek etymology lessons woven in to show us how the small and everyday becomes epic, and vice versa. Marilyn Monroe (neé Norma Jeane Baker) is fused here with Helen of Troy, and elements of both milieus—Homer and Hollywood—populate the narrative. It's easy to imagine the blunt beauty of Carson's language being spoken and sung on stage."
"Carson at her best: arresting, exact, at once surprising and unsurprised. She depends on Euripides throughout, but pushes him further than he was prepared to go."
Public Books - Jeff Dolven
02/01/2020
Poet and classics scholar Carson (Float ) reimagines Euripides' play Helen in this genre-blurring performance piece, merging the mythic persona of Helen of Troy—whose abduction by Paris triggered the Trojan War—with that of the eponymous Norma Jeane, aka Marilyn Monroe, during the troubled filming of Fritz Lang's Clash by Night in 1952. Carson adopts Euripides' premise that the abducted Helen was only a phantasm created by feuding gods, suggesting that the catastrophic Trojan War—and by implication all war—was fought literally over nothing. Interspersed among Helen/Norma Jeane's soliloquies on warfare, deception, motherhood, and sexism ("Oh my darlings/ they tell you you're born with a precious pearl./ Truth is, / it's a disaster to be a girl") are etymological interludes, at once erudite and mordant, plumbing the origins and cultural ramifications of words such as wound , deception , and slavery . VERDICT Lest this all sound academic or overly meta, one need not be a student of ancient Greek drama or a pop culture historian to admire Carson's unique artistry. The poet's wry, pointed diction and radiant precision (e.g., Truman Capote "had a voice like a negligee, always/ slipping off one bare shoulder, just a bit") bring Helen/Norma Jeane to vivid life as she attempts to "save [tragedy] from sorrow."—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
