Rating: 
Summary: amazing
Review: ...Then stay away from this book! The only compaint I have about it is all those epigrams. But otherwise it is simply glorious. The epigrams are easy to ignore, and the rest you will eat up with fervered love of the language. A smart lady, this one!
Rating:
Summary: Love Hurts
Review: Anne Carson has written a beautiful book of poems/tangoes that somehow tell the story of a marriage without actually telling a story. We have fully realized moments, conversations (Carson writes amazing poetic conversations, here and in her other works), events -- without all the connections in between. And yet these moments are woven together, internally and from one tango to the next, with language used as the steps of a dance, providing motifs and figures that carry the reader from one page to the next. Dance, games, rules, war, the rules of war, love, beauty, truth, lies and betrayal -- all of these themes run in and out of the complicated pattern of steps. The technique always serves the lyric, however, and we never lose sight of the feelings Carson wishes to evoke. You feel the separate pains of each betrayal (her betrayal of her mother, the not-yet-husband's failure to appear for their wedding, his first infidelity, each subsequent lie), but despite the pain there is no bitterness in this book -- in fact, Carson's final advice is to "hold beauty." Just as you cannot tell the tale of the lover without telling the tale of the beloved (as the final poem ironically suggests), so, perhaps, you cannot have love, beauty and truth without their opposites. Carson, plainly, is on the side of beauty.
Rating:
Summary: Love Hurts
Review: Anne Carson has written a beautiful book of poems/tangoes that somehow tell the story of a marriage without actually telling a story. We have fully realized moments, conversations (Carson writes amazing poetic conversations, here and in her other works), events -- without all the connections in between. And yet these moments are woven together, internally and from one tango to the next, with language used as the steps of a dance, providing motifs and figures that carry the reader from one page to the next. Dance, games, rules, war, the rules of war, love, beauty, truth, lies and betrayal -- all of these themes run in and out of the complicated pattern of steps. The technique always serves the lyric, however, and we never lose sight of the feelings Carson wishes to evoke. You feel the separate pains of each betrayal (her betrayal of her mother, the not-yet-husband's failure to appear for their wedding, his first infidelity, each subsequent lie), but despite the pain there is no bitterness in this book -- in fact, Carson's final advice is to "hold beauty." Just as you cannot tell the tale of the lover without telling the tale of the beloved (as the final poem ironically suggests), so, perhaps, you cannot have love, beauty and truth without their opposites. Carson, plainly, is on the side of beauty.
Rating:
Summary: amazing
Review: beautiful and shocking. a piece for any reader. the essential beauty and shocking nature of the human is wonderfully conveyed in this piece. i participate in competitive forensics and placed 9th in the state with this piece, in my first year. the piece has so many levels that it can be understood and throughly enjoyed by the least literate, least educated and those with doctorate degrees in literature. while it may not have the same spirit as many of carson's other works, it has a beauty of its own as it creates a very complex comprehensive story of a husband and betrayed wife, with wonderful words in the 28th tango. remember "hold, hold beauty." those who are still trapped in carson's other works remember to allow the writer grow too, don't confine her to what you think she should be doing. remain open to changes in carson... she has not yet reached her prime.
Rating:
Summary: phenomenology of pain
Review: In "The Beauty of the Husband," Carson continues her exploration-- begun in her 1986 book, "Eros the Bittersweet"--of how love, beauty, knowledge and pain intersect. This project continued through "Glass, Irony, and God," and "Plainwater." "Beauty" can only be understood in that context; those who take "Autobiography of Red" to be her most representative or best work are missing the point, as are those who want to find in Carson a "poet." She is not a poet, and will inevitably disappoint those who expect her to be. She is really a phenomenologist. Her language only *sounds* poetic, because she is forcing language to a new task, namely to bring you into direct contact with a phenomenon--the pain beauty inflicts. In this very specific sense, Carson is a Platonist. Plato took Beauty to be irretrievably lost to us in this life, but desperately remembered and wanted. Beauty causes pain because it at the same time attracts and thwarts me. Anne Carson dealt with this anguish theoretically in "Eros;" "Beauty" is one more variation on that theme, where "the Husband" is the narrator's loved reminder of true Beauty. His beauty makes her want to know him (sweet), but he always spins out of her grasp (bitter). That is the *fact* of love: to read this book is to taste it on your own mind's tongue.
Rating: 
Summary: GIve this Genius a Break
Review: My friend told me recently that after reading Men in the Off Hours she couldn't even stand having the book in her house. She gave it to me and I read it immediately because I couldn't immagine what would cause her, or anyone, to react so strongly and negatively to a book. I see now, I have to admit, where that distate comes from. The book is weak. It's sense of the line is nearly nonexistent, and the story seems to have been recycled from two previous books (there are references made to her own earlier work in Plainwater and Men in the Off Hours, which I find tacky and a little self-obsessed.) On the bright side, I still have faith in Anne Carson's work. She's written some great poems in the past, so I know there's talent there that can reemerge.
Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary Book from the Best English-speaking Poet
Review: This is Anne Carson's lastest book, and as with any wonderfully original talent, it is her best. Here there is her characteristic wry tone overlayed with a fine intelligence that only Seamus Heaney currently can rival. Do NOT miss this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Her Worst
Review: This is the worst book Anne Carson has written among the slew of books she's put out within the past seven years. She needs to slow down. I think she has forgotten that she's writing poetry.
Rating:
Summary: Certainly weaker than some previous work
Review: Through the first half of this book, I was disappointed. Although Anne Carson was continuing her interesting use of language and her use of Keats quotations was brilliant, the volume lacked universality. It presented a courtship and marriage every dependent upon the particular individuals and their peculiarities. The courtship and marriage of individuals unknown to the reader has limited interest. Fortunately, through the remainder of the book, Anne Carson finally finds her voice for this book. It becomes an interesting exploration of beauty especially beauty in the context of marriage. In one brilliant chapter she gives quotations of elegiac couplets recording the view of a branch through her back kitchen window. After a sampling of seasons, she closes with "Well I won't bore you with the whole annal. Point is, in total so far, 5820 elegiacs/ Which occupy 53 wirebound notebooks, / Piled on four shelves in the back kitchen. . ." She succeeds in painting a picture of a year's psychological response in a truly innovative manner. Any author continually expanding their repetoire will make some missteps. This volume includes some of Anne Carson's missteps but it also includes some exciting innovation. Read and enjoy but don't expect perfection.
Rating:
Summary: Certainly weaker than some previous work
Review: Through the first half of this book, I was disappointed. Although Anne Carson was continuing her interesting use of language and her use of Keats quotations was brilliant, the volume lacked universality. It presented a courtship and marriage every dependent upon the particular individuals and their peculiarities. The courtship and marriage of individuals unknown to the reader has limited interest. Fortunately, through the remainder of the book, Anne Carson finally finds her voice for this book. It becomes an interesting exploration of beauty especially beauty in the context of marriage. In one brilliant chapter she gives quotations of elegiac couplets recording the view of a branch through her back kitchen window. After a sampling of seasons, she closes with "Well I won't bore you with the whole annal. Point is, in total so far, 5820 elegiacs/ Which occupy 53 wirebound notebooks, / Piled on four shelves in the back kitchen. . ." She succeeds in painting a picture of a year's psychological response in a truly innovative manner. Any author continually expanding their repetoire will make some missteps. This volume includes some of Anne Carson's missteps but it also includes some exciting innovation. Read and enjoy but don't expect perfection.
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