Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera
Anne Carson
Knopf (245 pages)
$24.95

Carson is a poet who resists definition: modern and classical, remote and piercing, experimental and traditional. Her books are often the embodiment of paradox, and they challenge the reader’s expectations in multiple ways. As one might expect from a professor of classical studies, her work is imbued with a deeply scholarly and intellectual essence, but, at the same time, it never lacks a profoundly emotional and affecting edge. Michael Ondaatje proclaims she is “the most exciting poet writing in English today,” while Susan Sontag asserts, “[i]f there is a magazine that has something of hers in it, I buy it automatically.” Carson’s latest effort, Decreation, will only increase the praise received from critics and poets alike.

The thirteen parts of Decreation are predictably eclectic—suites of poems, lyric essays, prose poetry, and “operas.” As one enters the world of her poetry, the fragmentation can prove startling, but when viewed as a whole, a handful of steely threads draw the elements of Decreation together. Carson is not content to be an observer of the human condition, rather she relentlessly digs into the shadows of the human experience, exposing both the fragmentation of the mind (a theme heightened by the structure) and the paradoxical nature of her work: wholeness achieved through disparity.

The bookbegins with Stops, a section comprised of fourteen short poems that explore the loss of the speaker’s mother, echoing the elegant, erudite ache of The Glass Essay (New Directions, 1995). Carson studies grief through the lenses of the classical (Ovid) and the mundane (dog shit), creating a portrait that’s simultaneously lofty and rooted in the human world. Three particularly interesting poems in Stops incorporate Samuel Beckett—a writer who appears throughout Decreation.  In Her Beckett, Carson writes: “Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by Beckett. /You know that sense of sinking through crust, /the low black oh no of the little room/with walls too close, so knowable” (14). Again, the ingredients of the poem are at odds: Carson’s tone is somewhat conversational, her content relatable, but she’s using a notoriously obtuse artist to illuminate her subject. And what does her use of Beckett (and his bleak outlook) communicate about the speaker’s own philosophies? Like much of Decreation, the poems in Stops are stimulating works that leave the reader swimming in serious questions about the world we move through.

Carson continues her investigation of the fragmented mind in Every Exit is an Entrance (in praise of sleep), where she examines the different spheres people slip into during sleep and how sleep has been represented in literature: “I wish to praise sleep as a glimpse of something incognito. Both words are important. Incognito means ‘unrecognized, hidden, unknown.’ Something means not nothing” (20). Through the works of Bishop, Woolf, Plato, and Homer, Carson highlights the multifaceted nature of the “sleep side” (23) and the reader cannot help but be struck by her complex rendering of the mind. Decreation includes three other essays, Foam: On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni, Totality: The Colour of Eclipse, and Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porter, and Simone Weil Tell God. Carson slips gracefully into the essay form, as her prose possesses a lyricism that complements the other facets of the book. In addition, the essayistic moments in her verse and the melding of poetry and prose, hallmarks of Carson’s work, further enables the seamless integration of the essays.

Carson also directs her keen and creative analysis towards visual art via a piece on Betty Godwin’s Seated Figure with Red Angle. This seems a natural topic for Carson, as she also works in the visual arts—her painting, Volcano Talk, is featured on the paperback cover of Glass, Irony, and God (New Directions, 1995). In Seated Figure with Red Angle, Carson unearths the essential qualities of the Godwin painting and recreates the experience of viewing an evocative image for the first time. She provides the flood of associations and ideas that seem all at once incongruent and linked, as well as the slow rearing of the subconscious that occurs in the fleeting moments just before the intellect shapes the experience into some kind of aesthetic and reasoned statement. The poem spans five pages and returns to the ideas of unstable realities (punctuated by each line beginning with “if”) and paradox: “If objects are not solid. /If objects are much too solid. /If there are no faces, if faces are not what you interrogate. /If red makes you think of chance or what chance operates with” (98).

Beckett makes several appearances in Decreation, most notably in Quad, a section accompanied by a photograph of the play that bears the same name. On a superficial level, this segment operates as a kind of Beckett tutorial, in which Carson breaks down the play:

do they go away
Yes but they come back then go away again and it ends amid exits. It ends in time, I mean stranded.
is there a plot
To keeping moving at all times and not touch the hole at the center of the thinness. Each clear mark moves in from a corner of the thinness, (which is rectangular), dodges around the hole, moves out to a different corner of the thinness, paces around the edge to the nearest counter-clockwise corner, moves in from that corner, etc. (119-120)

In the way Beckett might, Carson answers her questions with non-answers: “it ends amid exits,” for example. The poet’s themes of fragmentation, instability, and isolation pulse through these passages. The idea of “end[ing] in time, I mean stranded” suggests paralysis and a tenuous reality: Beckett’s players are not standing on solid ground, but within a sort of psychological black hole. And then there’s the delicious metaphor of “the hole at the center” and the way the players “dodge” it, challenging the reader to wonder what the space represents and what holes lie outside their own “corner[s] of thinness.” 

A crucial phrase, “integrity of incoherence,” (121) an expression apparently repeated to no great surprise in the notes of a Beckett student, appears later in Quad. Carson undertakes a definite aesthetic turn midway through Decreation; the poems become more abstract and the meanings more obscured, so it’s no accident that “integrity of incoherence” is introduced approximately halfway through the book. Carson prepares her reader for the challenging intellectual territory that lies ahead, but, like in Beckett, the struggle to locate meaning does not imply a lack of meaning. On the contrary, there is an overabundance of meaning that, even before the work is fully understood, fills the reader with a deep curiosity, excitement, and satisfaction.

Carson also raises significant questions about form in Decreation: how does one distinguish poetry and prose? Is the difference in composition or conception? What is the value of attempting to define the genres concretely? This poet doesn’t provide conclusive answers, and, though her work is inextricably concerned with these points, the pieces are not in any way constrained by an experimental dialogue. The reader does not witness a struggle against the boundaries of genre, and her explorations of form and language seem almost effortless.

Decreation utilizes an intricate cast of characters: Virginia Woolf, Sappho, Antonioni, Beckett, Longinus,Marguerite Porter, Simone Weil – to name a few. The works embody a longing for fulfillment and knowledge, an examination of fragmented minds and fragile realities. The speaker in Stops longs to connect with her mother and comprehend her loss. The female subjects of Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porter, and Simone Weil Tell God find themselves estranged from both culture and the self. And no writer “does alienation” like Beckett, who is (literally and conceptually) a forceful presence in the book.

Paradox is another reoccurring element in Decreation, and perhaps the largest contradiction appears in the title. “Decreation” is a term borrowed from Simone Weil, referring to the destruction of self, or as Carson puts it, “getting the self out of the way” (167), as a means of getting closer to God, in Weil’s case. The significance of the title raises some curious questions: what pinnacle should readers be straining to reach? How can the self be “decreated” through contemplation and scholarship; i.e. pursuits that seem to further define one’s conception of self? Perhaps different answers lie within different reader, the various ways we grapple with “undo[ing] the creature in us” (167) in order to reach our own apex. Whether one finds Decreation ingenious or ineffable, Carson leaves the reader wrestling with complex questions regarding history, politics, identity, gender, and literature. And, she never fails to engage and intrigue, which is, in the end, what matters most.