04 July,2010 10:38 AM IST | | Sunday Midday Team
Nox by Anne Carson is many things. It's an elegy for a dead brother, it's a poem, it's a book, it's a box. The Canadian author-poet-translator packs in notes, pictures, drawings, and mini-dissertations of Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus' poem Catullus.
The poem itself was written as a final farewell to Gaius' brother. Nox's pages, neatly packed in a box, open out to form a Jacob's ladder of sorts. This is the first book of poetry in five years by the very reticent author. The book tells us certain things, like the fact that her brother was on the run from the law for a couple of years, that he roamed Europe and India under a fake passport. It doesn't tell us how he died, or why he was on the run though. Online reviews call it an 'experience' more than a read.
About why she chose a classic poem to speak of her brother's death, Carson has been quoted online saying, "I wanted to fill my elegy with lights of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he's dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history. So I began to think about history."
Nox, 192 pages, has been published by New Directions, and is available on amazon.com
