Many poets of Anne Carson's stature seem to exist in a rarefied atmosphere only accessible to the insular world of 21st-century poetry devotees and...
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Aug 07, 2007
VIII. IT WAS JUST NIGHT LAUNDRY SNAPPING ITS VOWELS ON THE LINE WHEN MOTHER SAID WHAT'S THAT SOUND
Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony
because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive.
Was he a poet? Yes and no.
His letters, we agree, were highly poetic. They fell into my life
like pollen and stained it. I hid them from my mother
yet she always knew.
Lover, merciful one
you write me but More...
Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony
because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive.
Was he a poet? Yes and no.
His letters, we agree, were highly poetic. They fell into my life
like pollen and stained it. I hid them from my mother
yet she always knew.
Lover, merciful one
you write me but More...
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Sep 06, 2011
Kathryn
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This entire book is one progressive poem, told from the point of view of the wife. She is a totally unsympathetic figure, except for maybe when she is remembering how she first met her husband, how she was first ensnared. Carson has written a complex and melancholy tale of the pitfalls of beauty, presented in 29 Tangos, or interconnected poems. The poems build upon eachother, grow from eachother, and I would gladly be rating this 5 stars if the final poem had not felt so limp when compared to th
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May 14, 2008
Jenna
rated it: 
* to what extent does TBOTH succeed as a book-length piece of fiction? I had difficulty sympathizing with the protagonist, who seemed to love her spouse for no other reason than his alleged "beauty." The character for whom I felt the most sympathy was Ray, and I felt that he was under-utilized. But perhaps I'm not supposed to approach this work the way one approaches a novel -- Achilles is one of the least sympathetic protagonists in all of fiction, but that doesn't make "The I
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Jan 06, 2008
Dana
rated it:
I maybe would have given this four stars but upon reading the last poem I shut the book and uttered "ah, that was great!" and my boyfriend quickly snagged it from my hands.
This is the first Anne Carson book I've read and I doubt will be the last. I anticipate reading this one again as well. As it is deceptively a quick read, I read it quickly. Which is, I would suggest, the best way to read it at first. But, there are so many crevices and lowlit alleys to explore betw More...
This is the first Anne Carson book I've read and I doubt will be the last. I anticipate reading this one again as well. As it is deceptively a quick read, I read it quickly. Which is, I would suggest, the best way to read it at first. But, there are so many crevices and lowlit alleys to explore betw More...
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Feb 21, 2008
Dawn
rated it:
Quick. Before everybody gets here with their foaming and fawning, I'll tell you that the book is yes still a book. It has its on's and off's and it doesn't really try to release itself from the constraints that are laid out in the beginning. That its pulped in a way. That its sadnesses are very hard and while it's not about mastery, it's about something akin to the suffering that comes from mastery. That the thinking takes the poem hostage in parts and yeah, that's sort of the point, but that po
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Nov 26, 2007
Evie
rated it: 
I bought this book around the time I got separated from my ex-husband. I didn't quite know what to expect. I just knew I liked the title and subtitle: husband and tango. It sat on my shelf for a while.
I re-read it during my recent poetry streak, and this time I found it absolutely haunting and daring. I don't think it's a book you sit down to "understand"; rather, it's a work to feel, to resonate with, to weep with.
I re-read it during my recent poetry streak, and this time I found it absolutely haunting and daring. I don't think it's a book you sit down to "understand"; rather, it's a work to feel, to resonate with, to weep with.
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Sep 16, 2007
Glenda
rated it:
Anne Carson is simply the greatest word master of our time. All her works are deeply anchored in classical texts, poetry, and contemporary imagery. However, The Beauty of the Husband is a slim drama in poetic prose (dances) that moves like a Eugene O'Neill play through the senses and leaves you with a burned out mark where the heart used to be. Fantastic!
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Jun 26, 2011
Winston
rated it:
Probably the best blurb I have ever read: "The Beauty of the Husband is an essay on Keat's idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in twenty-nine tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end."
The Beauty of the Husband's narrative follows a completely dedicated wife's attempt to enumerate the parts of her manically infidel husband's heart, their relationship, and their divorce. Carson's voice feels truly authent More...
The Beauty of the Husband's narrative follows a completely dedicated wife's attempt to enumerate the parts of her manically infidel husband's heart, their relationship, and their divorce. Carson's voice feels truly authent More...
Sep 27, 2011
Mark S.
rated it:
an incendiary, moving book of poetry. It reads on many levels, from the simple narrative (not completely simple because there are movements in time along with the movements of the heart)through language and structure. I finished it on an early September morning before walking to the top of Mt. Baldy in Sun Valley, where it shadowed my steps and even colored the fossil-scored shale I picked up. The book is highly approachable but lingering, much like I remember my discovery of Sharon Olds' Satan
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Oct 02, 2008
Rachel
rated it:
Poetry at it's best. I read a lot of it aloud just to enjoy the beauty of the words. I loved all the ancient myth and classical references. Such a sad story buoyed up by the life and breath of gorgeous language.
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Jul 17, 2008
mr. kate
rated it:
Anne Carson amazes me. Her voice seems to exhist and not exhist at the same time...she also can feel the pulse of desire and translates it in a way so comepletely structured with longing it's like a whisper.
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Mar 05, 2011
Leslie
rated it:
This book is very lovely on the whole, but I had the same reaction to it that I often have to Joan Didion. I know the way I bristle at anything bourgie is some immature vestige of my punk rock past, but I could not escape the dreaded beige while reading. Still, I was fascinated that these poems managed to get me in the gut while also reminding me too keenly of a lifetime movie in which the protagonist wears cream and a french twist tucked with seed pearls. One of the "tangos" took plac
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Jul 15, 2007
Colie!
rated it:
Hands down my absolute favorite book of poems, and one of my all-time favorite books period. Gorgeous, haunting, engaging, fucking amazing. AMAZING. READ IT.
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Nov 30, 2008
Kimberly
rated it:
I thought of Shelley Jackson, I don't know which one came first but it had those strange hypertextual leaps between very short fragments (at least they were in order). These were very interesting, and I'm pleased with the power of the title "A Fictional Essay" meaning the crazy lady and her crazy husband are not real and not Anne Carson and her ex-husband. OR are they? I don't really care. This is for re-reading, because the only effect of her using several different fonts is that I ig
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Jul 11, 2009
Melanie
rated it:
This book broke my heart more than a little...and I liked it. Anne Carson is such a distinctive voice in literature--utterly unique and ultra-academic. Sometimes I pull her books down from the shelf to marvel (and to make my head spin, in a good way). Although she likes to pepper her work with mythological references, there's very little of that in this book. Word on the street is that it's about her ex-husband, although Canadian Anne mostly keeps mum about her personal life. A powerful, un
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Dec 28, 2011
Johnny
rated it:
I still don't understand much of this, but the writing feels uneven. This might just be because of the shifts from journalistic writing, to scholarship, to difficult poetry. Parts of the writing still feel like digressions. My other inchoate complaint is that talking about passion and obsession in an occasionally humorous and academic tone can, for better or worse, be a bit discomforting.
Regardless, there are many vivid moments and scenes. The best seem to be when the character More...
Regardless, there are many vivid moments and scenes. The best seem to be when the character More...
Sep 12, 2009
Allison
rated it:
Amen, Sister. She captures it. She got it down: exactly how it feels to be betrayed by a lover and by the self for still loving the betrayer. The book was page after page of surprises on a not-so-surprising subject. I am amazed at how much she renders without a hint of sentimentality. It think this is because her images are brutally lucid. This helps because any abstract or intellectual investigation that happens subsequently are securely staked to the poem by such strong images. For example, I’
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Aug 01, 2011
Kelly
rated it:
An incredibly stunning work. Interlacing keats' truth and beauty with a marriage wracked by infidelity. What is love,truth and beauty explored in an intense and terse series of poems. I will read this book multiple times over the next few months, I trust more will unfold from the poem each time I approach it. I have read three of her books of poetry; this volume mixes genres in a postmodern triumph that is not arch or trite. Read Carson, then read bee again.
Dec 23, 2011
Carrie
rated it:
letters made one day different from another, made if into sun.
this book is serious about love, serious about how stupid it makes us, how broken and bent over we are without it. keats, the ultimate romantic, but the one most willing to move within his definitions of love anchors the book with insertions of quotes, notes, bits of poems. titles of each tango are amazing.
this book is serious about love, serious about how stupid it makes us, how broken and bent over we are without it. keats, the ultimate romantic, but the one most willing to move within his definitions of love anchors the book with insertions of quotes, notes, bits of poems. titles of each tango are amazing.
Apr 14, 2009
Nic
rated it:
8. The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
Michael Symmons wrote in a Guardian review: "Canadian poet Anne Carson’s tracing of a single love affair through to the breakdown of a marriage has won her many admirers. This book is an amazing balancing act - classical and colloquial, surreal but rooted in telling everyday details." Concur.
Michael Symmons wrote in a Guardian review: "Canadian poet Anne Carson’s tracing of a single love affair through to the breakdown of a marriage has won her many admirers. This book is an amazing balancing act - classical and colloquial, surreal but rooted in telling everyday details." Concur.
Nov 24, 2008
Kent
rated it:
Full speed ahead for Carson! I remember being suspicious of a group of poems called "tangos." Just seemed a little schticky to me. But then each of these poems is an intense movement between dance partners. Pushing along with a sense of inevitability, and contradiction.
Oct 17, 2010
Janey
rated it:
This is incredibly painful to read, even more to have lived through. There is a release from naming the agony of betrayal, illusion, relationships gone wrong, love misplaced, love misunderstood, belonging, not belonging. All are here in this amazing book.
Jul 03, 2009
Chapin
rated it:
I overlooked one thing.
That the beautiful when I encountered it would turn out to be
prior-- inside my own heart,
already eaten.
Not out there with purposiveness, with temple, with God.
Inside. He was already me.
Condition of me.
p 140
That the beautiful when I encountered it would turn out to be
prior-- inside my own heart,
already eaten.
Not out there with purposiveness, with temple, with God.
Inside. He was already me.
Condition of me.
p 140
May 09, 2011
For the beauty of the husband--the poetic, unfaithful, mendacious husband--the wife marries him. These poems are full of allusions both mundane ('laundry snapping its vowels on the line' [VIII]) and literary (invoking the Bible, Jane Eyre, ancient Greek writers like Homer, and, of course, Keats). Is beauty truth? The husband would suggest otherwise but relationships are complicated. Even though the marriage is central to the poems, it is half-glimpsed and half-comprehended. One cannot look direc
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Jan 13, 2011
Lisa
rated it:
That certainly left me feeling under-educated. I missed a lot (all?) of the literary references. That affected my rating because it's based on my experience with the book. Interesting concept and best read aloud.
Apr 27, 2011
Tiffany
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This is the book I will always read when I have a broken heart. It reminds me of that pain's universality and of the indissoluble bond that deep love creates. Also, that men are assholes.
Jan 04, 2011
Song
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I wonder why the cover of the english version of the book covers up the eyes but the german version shows the eyes. I always though the cover portrait was a woman but clearly it is a man.
Nov 05, 2011
Rafe
rated it:
I think it's safe to say that I would give Anne Carson 5 stars if she wrote down the phone book (which I'm sure she will eventually, in some new and astounding way that makes the rest of us feel weak but inspired).
Although I had read most of Carson's books before entering my MFA program, this one was one of the texts assigned by our fiercest professor. This meant that I read Beauty of the Husband through a much more critical lens than I had used on Carson's other work...and it still he More...
Although I had read most of Carson's books before entering my MFA program, this one was one of the texts assigned by our fiercest professor. This meant that I read Beauty of the Husband through a much more critical lens than I had used on Carson's other work...and it still he More...
Apr 04, 2011
R.
rated it:
Anger and depression all wrapped up in grace. I especially enjoyed the conversation poems, they were so simple and so cutting. They played like a hum growing into a massive din; low frequencies resonating threat in your bones.
