SOURCE: Hamilton, Jeff. “This Cold Hectic Dawn and I.” Denver Quarterly 32, nos. 1-2 (summer-fall 1997): 105-24.

In the following review, Hamilton discusses Carson's experimental use of genre and form in Plainwater and Glass, Irony and God, arguing that both volumes “accomplish the enormous task of reimagining the border between the meditative lyric and the autobiographical narrative poem.”

These two books [Plainwater and Glass, Irony and God] by the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson accomplish the enormous task of reimagining the border between the meditative lyric and the autobiographical narrative poem. How do we talk about what hasn't been done before? Averse to the unsettling hybrid forms among the books' eleven pieces, some readers may decide Carson doesn't write poems. Formally, her work ranges from prose poem to verse novel, generically from satire to scholarly essay, with a dollop of confession to garnish them. The lyric commodity some of...