Antigonick [Paperback]

Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides.Carson is nothing less than brilliantunfalteringly sharp indiction, audacious, and judicious in taking liberties.Reading Anne Carson is to experience aeuphonious, mystical sort of perplexity.She reaches past the contemporary moment to craft her unique anduniversal voice, one that is both as ancient as Sappho andintimidatingly modern.People who dont read poetry read Anne Carson.She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.It is a cry of grief posed in question form, emphatic, handwritten, excessive and abbreviated and, in this sense, a measured scream that gives us some sense of who or what lives on when it is all too late.Her poetry is light, swift, and beautiful.The reader, the listener is provoked and challenged to the utmost.Ms. Carson does more than just update the language and quicken the pacingshe rewrites the play, mines its subtleties, its absurdity and its strangely comic timing and manages to produce a unique text out of a story that goes back much further than the fifth century when Sophocles wrote his version.Carson's poetry convinces. Carson's work is irrepressibly modern and provoking.Stone's illustrations and the hand-lettered text makeHer poetry is expressionistic (you see this inIn Carson's hands, this small, familiar Greek volume takes on a thunderously fresh rhythm, a satisfying blend of poetry and prose.Her poetry at it's best, like Antigone's character, is a thrilling combination of hot-blooded instinct and dispassionate resolve.The experiment's a fascinating one, and this interesting, risk-taking book is unignorable.This is where Carson's best work is staged: in the uncanny gateway between the temporal and the timeless; in the nick between the world of powerboats and the sublime, terrifying realm of the dead and the still lively gods.Carson'sAn illulÓ)