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     On the back of the stoplight-red cover wrapped around God and Glass, Michael Ondaatje, among others, registers his enthusiasm: “Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today”. One might alter the hyperbole to something like “Anne Carson, alas, may be one of the definitive poets of the late twentieth century”, for it is as a reflector of contemporary attitudes – attitudes to women, attitudes to truth, attitudes to language – that this poet chiefly recommends herself to her readers. Her poems put me in mind of the architectural developments around London’s Docklands – those towering glass monoliths that, straining credulity and soaring arrogantly over humbler habitations made of stone or bricks-and-mortar, draw from outside observers sighs of acceptance, maybe, but hardly expressions of love. It’s not that “love” has no place in Carson’s glassy constructions; on the contrary, “love” in her work is one of those concepts so reflected and reflected upon that it splinters into a multiplicity of signs. None of these signs, however, points to “truths” that lie outside the writer’s soul (as she uses this word) or mind.

     Like all writing, Carson’s is made of words, though her twentieth-century experience and literary philosophy have taught her to mistrust words (and also stories) as simple handles of the emotions. Carson explains her approach to poetry in an introduction to the last and most portentous sequence in this collection, a prose section called ‘Talks’. What she wants to achieve, she says, is a literature of natural instants “without the boredom of a story”. Since most people prefer stories and are not very interested in using “infinitives and participles oddly enough” to stop a story from happening once it gets started, it is likely that Carson’s poems will attract mainly a following of fashion-setters: women’s groups, therapists, famous novelists of questionable talent; she writes, in short, for the ideologues of her time. As for instants of nature, they appear, so to speak, framed and glazed in her work, between instants of memory or analysis, or as backgrounds to a slightly coy quirkiness. To me, her poems are more cinemagraphic than natural; their glassiness reminds me constantly of the television. Even the God she constructs in a section called ‘The Truth About God’ sounds as if He had been hauled in for interview, invisible and inaudible but still male and therefore accountable to women for all His mysterious, ill-conceived acts of prejudice and cruelty.

     The most accessible of the five sections of God and Glass is also the one that most resembles a story. The speaker of ‘The Glass Essay’ is a young woman who has been traumatised by the departure of her lover, a man given the symbolic name, Law. To get over her desertion by Law, our speaker peers down through the looped time-glass of more than a century to seek out Emily Brontë, with whom she identifies, especially on occasions when, laden with books, she goes to visit her aged mother “on a moor in the north”. The reader assumes, at first, that this moor over which the speaker wanders in imitation of Brontë must be in Yorkshire, failing to notice that the place-reference is psychological, not geographical: “Whenever I visit my mother/ I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,/ my lonely life around me like a moor,/ my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation/ that dies when I come in the kitchen door./ What meat is it, Emily, we need?”

     So the moor is the speaker’s lonely life – the only common ground she actually does share with Emily Brontë, who never had a lover who wasn’t imaginary (we are given to understand that Law was both real and sexual). Nor did Emily Brontë undergo therapy or take to eating yoghurt alone after a break-up, or feel obliged to visit a conventional, cruelly despised mother on a Canadian “moor” (what Yorkshirewoman, even today, would eat pumpernickel toast for breakfast or read the Sears Catalog?) or recoil from a once handsome father crazed in old age by Alzheimer’s disease and shut up in a home. The events, in short, that the speaker lets drop about her own life contribute to a story or confession that the writer seeks to hide under the glass of a well-researched essay on Brontë and imagination. When Carson cites Emily’s resolute misspelling of the word “whach” (for watch), for example, she enlists understanding and sympathy for the visionary watcher in Brontë whose role in the poem is to be a cover for the author.

     This is not to criticise Carson’s poem unduly. The title, ‘The Glass Essay’, after all confesses to the author’s method, and the actual story rises to heights when it depicts the speaker’s visions: a sequence mainly of nude women who stand flayed to the bone by wind and weather until a kind of healing, or peace-making with universal suffering, takes place.

I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air. It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached but as I came closer/ I saw it was a human body/ trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones./ And there was no pain./ The wind/ was cleaning the bones./ They stood forth silver and necessary./ It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all./ It walked out of the light.

I have printed out the above as a paragraph (strokes indicate line endings) to show how close to prose Carson’s writing hovers, intentionally playing down the language to show off the image. This seems to me a legitimate, camera-like technique, and ‘The Glass Essay’ only seems suspect, even phoney to me as art, when Carson attempts to assimilate her twentieth-century sufferings with those of her nineteenth-century mentor. What cheek, really, for a Canadian woman-academic (however convinced of her gift as a visionary) to summon the voice and “raw little soul” of Emily Brontë to do her romantic writing for her. Raw little soul, indeed! Emily Brontë’s soul was immense, miles wider and higher than the honed down, rent, reflected version which is all Anne Carson can show us of her own.

     Carson’s contributions to ‘The Glass Essay’, then, are convincing when they are visual or televisual, and they can be strong when they come at you as similes: Emily “had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow”. As for the “poetry” (sonority, rhythm, drama) that’s mostly left to Emily Brontë. Since the postmodern poet has lost faith in the language of emotion, it has to be quoted at second hand.

     Anne Carson’s cinemagraphic technique, not surprisingly, serves her best in her book’s middle sequence, ‘TV Men’, an all out attack on the media she has managed so successfully to amalgamate with her writing. ‘TV Men: Hektor’ begins,

TV is hardhearted, like Lenin.
TV is rational, like mowing.
TV is wrong, often, a worry.
TV is ugly, like the future.
TV is a classic example.

It continues, “Hektor’s family members found themselves engaged in exciting acts,/ and using excited language, which they knew derived from TV./ A classic example of what./ A classic example of a strain of cruelty.” So cruelty is perceived as giving tongue to the deeds of “classical” heroes and heroines – past and present, before and after TV – just as it was seen to “drift up the cracks” of romantic Emily Brontë. As a piece of in-depth insight and satire, ‘TV Men’ must be accounted a success. So, in a much lighter vein, must the book’s fourth sequence, titled ‘The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide’. It’s good to know that under this writer’s bitterly stoic attitude to suffering, lies hidden a nicely-tuned sense of humour.

     The more the pity, therefore, that the second section of God and Glass, called (without a blush) ‘The Truth About God’, should, without taking evolution into account, preach such egotistical theology, and that the last section, ‘Talks’, should, in places,  just fall flat. ‘Talks’ tries hard to sound cryptic, profound, learned and searching all at once, but for my taste its little jets or spurts of prose drop far too many literary names (second-handness again) and concede much too much to the clichéd resentments of the women’s movement.

     ‘The Truth About God’ fails partly because of its title. How can Anne Carson tell us “the truth about God” when she admits in her first sentence that “My religion makes no sense/ and does not help me/ therefore I pursue it”? Is this irony? She would have done better to call her poem ‘Thinking about God’ or ‘About God’ and let herself off the hook as far as truth is concerned. Even the Old Testament prophets never preached the truth about God; for them God was Truth, no complaints allowed. As for Christ in The New Testament, didn’t he go to some trouble to show, in story after story, how men have to take responsibility for their own faith and their own right actions? I can’t see that it makes theological sense to begin a poem called ‘God’s Justice’ by casting God as an absent-minded inventor:

In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks./ On the day He was to create justice/ God got involved in making a dragonfly/ and lost track of time./ It was about two inches long/ with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall [...]

And so forth. Apart from the incongruous writing and the silly reference to Lauren Bacall, the idea that nature’s creation of the dragonfly and mankind’s creation of justice – an abstract, anthropological concept pertaining only to human societies – can in any way be ideologically connected defies common sense, God or no God. Anne Carson has read a great deal of literature, and she is doubtless a fine classical scholar, but Darwin, evidently, has not yet swum into her ken. As for the misconceived creationism of ‘The Truth About God’ – I fervently hope that with all her talent and seriousness, Anne Carson, in her next book, broadens her thinking, strips off her feminist self-consciousness, turns off the TV and leaps over the one-way-glass barrier between postmodernism and nature’s world out there – a world that cares nothing about what she writes or doesn’t write about its non-anthropocentric realities.