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Charles Simic on Anne Carson

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  The Spirit of Play Charles Simic November 3, 2005 issue Reviewed: Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera by Anne Carson Knopf, 245 pp., $24.95 Glass, Irony and God by Anne Carson New Directions, 142 pp., $14.00 (paper) Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson Dalkey Archive, 190 pp.,$12.95 (paper) See All Anne Carson; drawing by David Levine Buy Print 1. Decreation is Anne Carson’s ninth collection of writings. It includes poems, essays, a screenplay, and an opera libretto. In the last twenty years, she has published two books of essays, one of translations, and five other books that are not easy to classify, since they contain not only poetry but a great variety of prose. While she is perfectly capable of composing a straightforward essay or a poem, montage is her preferred technique, allowing all her multiple talents as an essayist, a literary critic, a classical scholar, a translator, and a philologist to come into play. “A fictional essay in 29 tangos” is how, for instance, she descr...
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Obituary | The world seen anew Cyril Hilsum invented the flat-screen displays that hold us in thrall

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  Obituary | The world seen anew Cyril Hilsum invented the flat-screen displays that hold us in thrall The physicist and materials scientist died on September 23rd, aged 101 Save Share Photograph: GEC Oct 8th 2026 | 5 min read Listen to this story W henever in later life a fresh idea struck him, Cyril Hilsum would leave the dinner table and wander to his lab. He didn’t have far to go. Part of it was in the garage, part in the scullery, of his house in Pinner, north-west of London. The rest was in the kitchen. One counter was his electronics bench, with an oscilloscope, a pair of waveform generators, a spectrum analyser and a tray of voltage dividers looped to each other and to a soldering station with a maze of cables. On the facing counter stood a three-roll mill for working conductive powders, a precision balance, a small vacuum chamber and many labelled jars of carbon black and nickel powder. Everything had its place here apart from kitchen stuff; but he dined, and lunched to...
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Her Beckett Anne Carson

The Paris Review Subscribe Her Beckett Anne Carson Issue 151, Summer 1999 Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by                                                                                                        Beckett.    You know that sense of sinking through crust,          the low black oh no of the little room               with walls too close, so knowable. Clink and slow fade of toys that belong in memory    but wrongly appear here, vagrant and suffocated          on a page of pain,                Worse ...
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