Anne Carson, The H of H Playbook

For some years I have bought anything Anne Carson produces. Slow burners all. For a while the book is around, opened and closed. Examined but not read. Atoms are exchanged. Float, her box of leaflets, and red.doc, whose columns of text were originally a keyboard misstep. The afterlife of reading them echoed by the pre-life of having them in the room.

The H of H Playbook reminds me of my early presentation of my own poems, roughly chopped up typed text badly stuck into a supermarket school exercise book, lined, what's more. It doesn't show much respect for your own work, someone said. All of which was dizzying. 

Anne Carson's varying sizes of cut-out text on distressed backgrounds with bloody memories, line drawings (her own) and some torn pages. A triumph of disrespect, hardback, printed in China, full of dissonance and anachronism. Her second translation of Euripides' play, if translation is still the right word this far out from land, leaves a reader as embattled as Heracles during his Labours, and as wearied. Have two and half thousand years of histories brought us to this?

You look weary, I said to the lad at the checkout the other day. You mean tired? he asked. 

We are so weary we have all but lost the word.

As I turned the pages of the H of H Playbook, the collage of cut-outs and drawings and blotches, finely smoothed with classy creamy paper, an experience of turning pages for its own sake, interspersed with some turns of phrase I'd read off any page, at any time.

After an event like a killing he always needs to go to sleep, then he'll wake up feeling that cold clear thing he hates and it will be strange for a while and then he'll see. 

What Anne Carson has translated from Euripides is how we talk about seeming-inevitabilities. Some distressing silences. As she says, a glacier is silence until it snaps. How we dismiss the heroic and press NORMAL on the washing machine for the nth time. Have a sandwich. Take over from Atlas holding up the sky while he has a sandwich. If he doesn't come back, we'll just let go.