The Beauty of the Husband

Category: Book
By (author): Carson, Anne
Subject:  POETRY / Canadian
  POETRY / General
Awards: Griffin Poetry Prize Winner
Publisher: Knopf Random Vintage Canada
Published: February 2002
Format: Book-hardcover
Pages: 160
Size: 8.02in x 5.17in x 0.46in
Our Price:
$ 19.95
Availability:
In stock

Bookshelf comment

Such an intense poem that reads like a novel. An astounding container for a life of love and disappointment.

Additional Notes

From The Publisher*The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats's idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.

This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice - 29 "tangos" of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects - love - and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.
Review Quote*"The most exciting poet writing in English today." -Michael Ondaatje

"Brilliantly captured…Reading her is to experience a euphonious, mystical sort of perplexity…punctuated by what the husband himself calls ‘short blinding passages'…moments of almost unbearable poignancy." -The New York Times

"Her best book.... Her poetry's form and sensibility are quite unlike anything else." -The Globe and Mail

"With swift strokes depicting the illusions and disillusions of a marriage gone sour, Carson has managed to make the intellectual life hip. In her hands, a quote from Plato seems as natural as a pop reference…. Then there are the lines of sheer lyricism, lines that send us spinning back to the idea of beauty, of truth." -Miami Herald

"An exquisite meditation on love and loss that reads with the emotional depth - and with the ongoing resonance - of a great novel." -Elle

"I would read anything that [Anne Carson] wrote." -Susan Sontag
Biographical NoteAnne Carson lives in Canada.