Flaubert, snow, poverty, rhythm … the random musings of Anne Carson

Anne Carson, the celebrated Canadian-American poet, essayist and classical translator, is notoriously reticent about her work. She agreed to just these three sentences appearing on the cover of her first book in eight years:

Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.

Not only does this suggest the range of subjects explored but also Carson’s idiosyncratic, playful humour. Of course there are links between the pieces, and of course they are anything but wrong.

Wrong-footed by the blurb, it’s thrillingly difficult to find one’s balance on opening the book. The title page presents us with ‘wrong norma’ written twice in Carson’s handwriting, once upside down. It’s clear we’re entering a topsy-turvy world where we don’t know what to expect. The book is beautifully produced: facsimile pages of annotated typescript intersperse the 25 pieces, which range widely in subject matter, form and length. On turning a leaf, we could alight on a paragraph of prose, a conversation, verse stanzas stretching over pages, or a series of pictures. Sometimes the form switches mid-piece.

The German phrase denk es genau is copied by the woman narrator of ‘Eddy’ on to the cover of her notebook. She then asks (and translates): ‘Was that the problem? To think it exact?’ Wrong Norma is an exercise in thinking things exact, denk es genau. It’s a problem that produces a wealth of extraordinary digressions, ideas and resonances. In ‘Poverty Remix (Sestina)’, for instance, Carson uses the traditional poetic form to interrogate poverty (‘Poverty is a scapegoat… Why does poverty exist? Because stinginess does’) with reference to Hipponax, the first ancient Greek poet to write of the ritual of scapegoating, pharmakos.