This is what I was talking about...

(...in the previous poem.)


Meghan O'Rourke on Anne Carson's Nox:

Carson has always been interested in pockets of experience that can’t be approached directly but must be courted obliquely. This style is peculiarly suited to capturing grief, which is irrational, physiological, mutable—and, often, mute. As Iris Murdoch once wrote, “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.” Because the dead person is absent and voiceless (the word nox both rhymes with the Latin word vox, or voice, and contains the English word “no”), the bereaved is always experiencing the lost through other things: books, ideas, language, memory. A sense of this is what Carson’s memory book provides; its process of assemblage dramatizes the way the mind in mourning flits from pain at the specific loss to metaphysical questioning about what, exactly, constitutes a mortal life.

Read more:  THE UNFOLDING by Meghan O’Rourke


Interestingly, Carson's book was not the impetus for the poem however; McCann's was. I do have Carson's book and have been enthralled by it, but I put it down a month and a half ago and haven't come back to it yet. I guess my mind was/is still processing it. I will open it back up tonight.