GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE 2001Canadian Winner Book: Men in the Off Hours
Poet: Anne Carson
Publishers: Vintage Canada, Jonathan Cape (UK), Alfred A. Knopf (USA), Cape/Random House (Australia) Click the book cover or title to purchase Men in the Off Hours online. Read an excerpt. Biography  Anne Carson lives in Montreal, where she is Director of Graduate Studies, Classics, at McGill University. Her first book published in Britain, Glass and God, was shortlisted for the 1998 Forward Prize; her second, Autobiography of Red, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She has been the recipient of the Lannan Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the MacArthur Fellowship, and was named a member of the Order of Canada in August, 2005. Her recent works include Decreation, which combines poetry with opera libretto, oratorio, essays and more, published by Knopf, and her translation of Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, published by New York Review Books Classics. See also Margaret Atwood, Robert Bringhurst, Anne Carson, August Kleinzahler and Anne Simpson read at exclusive Griffin Poetry Prize event at Poetry International 2004 Anne Carson is a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. Judges’ Citation Anne Carson continues to redefine what a book of poetry can be; this ambitious collection ranges from quatrains studded with uncanny images (“Here lies the refugee breather/who drank a bowl of elsewhere”) to musing verse essays, personal laments, rigorous classical scholarship, and meditations on artists’ lives, caught in the carnage of history. All are burnished by Carson’s dialectical imagination, and her quizzical, stricken moral sense. Lazarus (1st draft) Inside the rock on which we live, another rock.
So they believe.
What is a Lamb of God? People use this phrase.
I don't know.
I watch my sister, fingers straying absently about her mustache,
no help there.
Leaves stir through the house like souls, they stream
from the porch,
catch in the speaking holes, glow and are gone.
Remember
what Prince Andrei said when they told him Moscow had burnt
right down to the ground.
He said Really?
A man who had been to the war! had seen our lives are just blind arrows
flying.
There he sat
on his cot all the same, trying to get the string to the bowhorn.
Actions go on in us,
nothing else goes on. While a blurred and breathless hour
repeats, repeats. From Men in the Off Hours, by Anne Carson |
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