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Anne Carson is Director of Graduate Studies, Classics, at McGill University, Montreal. This is her third book to be published in Britain. The first was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the second for the T S Eliot Prize. She has won numerous awards in Canada and the USA.

Her work is important because, in a particularly thoroughgoing way, it claims a supreme place for high culture in modern poetry. Almost all of the book, poetry and prose, consists of responses to writers and painters of the past. There are individual poems on Emily Dickinson, Sappho, Alkman, Freud, Hokusai and Audubon; sequences on Antonin Artaud, Tolstoy, Anna Akhmatova, Giotto and Edward Hopper; a series of versions of Catullus; and an academic essay with footnotes titled Desire and Dirt Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity which would not be out of place in a professional Classics journal.

In a book where almost all experience is mediated though people of the (sometimes remote) past, there is a risk of the past pressing claustrophobically on the reader. Carson seeks to lighten the pressure with various techniques. Two derive from the Pound of Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley the juxtaposition of different material without comment so that the reader finds their own connection between them, and the use of quotations from past works made ironic by placing them in a diminished modern context. Under Pound’s tutelage, both became structural principles of The Waste Land.

An example is the sequence of nine poems on paintings by the mid-twentieth century American painter, Edward Hopper. The poems have greatest effect when read with reproductions to hand (the paintings are not reproduced in the book) - they capture something of the bleak stillness of Hopper’s images of people alone or together-but-alone in ordinary urban settings. Each is followed, without comment, by a quotation from St Augustine’s Confessions, Book 11.

The effect is not ironic because that would assume some necessary emotional or moral connection between St Augustine and Hopper’s images by which, for example, the poet might imply that modern life is soulless. For readers who do not believe in the soul, possibly a majority, this would be crushingly banal and Carson avoids any such overt connection. The effect is cool and disengaged. She places Hopper and St Augustine before us side by side as two elements of cultural experience to which we are to respond as we wish. If we have a religious cast of mind, the sequence will confirm our view that modern life is soulless; if not, we note the juxtaposition as intriguing and move on. Carson has it both ways by remaining uninvolved, not insisting on either interpretation.

A similar strategy is at work in TV Men, a series prefaced by a cod quotation from Longinus about television. For example, the two longest sequences, on Artaud and Akhmatova, are described respectively as a ‘shooting script’ and a ‘treatment for a script’ for a film. But they have no element of film writing in them, neither in concept nor technique. They are indistinguishable from other poems in the book. We are to understand that ‘shooting script’ and ‘treatment’ are conceits, to be noted then disregarded as we read on.

This is not wit or playfulness - the tone and intent are wholly serious - and neither is Carson’s insistence on provisionality by labelling different, highly finished poems on the same subject “1st draft, 2nd draft,” etc. In no sense are these drafts. Again Carson is simultaneously inviting the reader to note and disregard what she says.

To simultaneously assert and deny is alienated behaviour and I have an strong sense of alienation at the heart of Carson’s work. One possible cause is that fact that, despite her feminism (seen most clearly in the academic essay and the warmth with which she writes about Virginia Woolf at the book’s beginning and end), her professional life is spent studying and teaching a culture that is almost wholly masculine. The difficulty of developing a feminist perspective on Ancient Greek and Roman civilisation is indicated by Carson’s frequent references to Sappho and by the academic essay, Dirt and Desire, which reads like a counterweight to expanses of writing about men.

Another element, whether symptom or cause, is a tendency to write with the flat precision of a professional translator. Carson occasionally rises to vivid imagery:

March threw its knives against the door

(though this may be an echo of Akhmatova about whom the poem is written)

A froth of fire is upon his mind

Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky

but the following - the end of the Giotto sequence - is more typical:

Meanwhile God on the other side of the painting is
sending
the whole heat of his love of Man across the wall
in a glance
towards Lazarus’ cheekbones still radiant with a
“studio light”
that twangs faintly on the day. Shadow if you
pay attention
to it too long will climb into your eyes and whiten
real objects.

Although the concept is wholly original, the movement of the language, apart from the slight rise of “twangs faintly on the day”, is closer to prose: explicit, unrhythmic, lacking cadence.

A third and most striking symptom of alienation is a lack of feeling for any of the writers and painters written about. They are simply displayed to us. The nearest Carson comes to an expression of feeling is “I like” applied to Thucydides and Alkman, a Spartan poet of the 7th century BC. The only warmth, apart from her writing about Virginia Woolf, is in her poem about Emily Dickinson, Sumptuous Destitution:

Save what you can, Emily.

Save every bit of thread.
Have you a little chest to put the Alive in?
            (Emily Dickinson letter 233 to Thomas Higginson)

One of them may be
By Cock, said Ophelia
            (Emily Dickinson letter 268 to Thomas Higginson)

the way out of here.

The collocation Dickinson’s increasingly desperate attempts to interest Higginson in her poems, Ophelia’s unintentional vulgarity used intentionally by Dickinson and the thread that led Theseus from the labyrinth is a juxtaposition whose purpose Pound and Eliot would have recognised: witty, erudite and strongly felt.

Little of the book has this personal engagement: watching a squirrel in an icy tree (New Rule), the first signs of her father’s dementia (Father’s Old Blue Cardigan), the reaction to her mother’s death mediated through Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Most touching of all is the prose account - Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve - in which a female Classics lecturer in a snowy city contemplates the possibility of an intimate relationship with a female student. “I” is replaced throughout with “Deneuve”, but there is no other reference to the French actress. It is a fantasy that both claims and denies the experience and the self that experienced it. It confirms that, at bottom, post-modernism is alienation which declares that there is no alternative to itself. The first title of the Deneuve piece is Irony Is Not Enough. Indeed it isn’t, though it would be something.