Anne Carson's Nox by the river

Anne Carson's Nox was not, at first sight, the best choice to read in the sunshine, on the grass, beside the Thames, last Sunday afternoon. It is a book in a box shaped in homage to a coffin, a concertina of pages that would have been easier to handle in a chair and bears an eery resemblance to sheet for wrapping dead bodies, an assemblage of artful lexicography and personal memoir, fractured and reconstructed around a melancholic Latin poem.

Not only did I consume it at a single river-bank ...