43:4 Autumn 1997

ANNE CARSON

Shadowboxer

Autumn 1997’s issue on “Contemporary Poetry & Poetics” included essays by Alan Golding, Jed Rasula, Michael Heller, Amiri Baraka, Keith Tuma, and others. The editors' introduction tells us that Anne Carson’s “Shadowboxer,” was submitted “as a response to the topic of ‘spirituality’ in poetry.” The famously reticent (or reticently famous) poet recently provided the following commentary:

I was taking boxing lessons at the time, but that’s probably obvious.

In “Shadowboxer” one can trace the ‘shadow’ of elements that emerge integral to Carson’s body of poetic work: anecdotes from classical scholarship and Greek and Roman translation merged with her mundanely tendered accounts of men and women in the day-to-day. The poem was reprinted in Men in the Off Hours (Knopf, 2000). In her Autumn 2000 review of Carson’s Economy of the Unlost (Princeton University Press, 1999), Danielle Allen wrote that Carson “renews our appreciation for grace, for gratuitous coin thrown on the pyre.” Professor of Classics and English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Carson’s most recent volume is Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (New York Review Books Classics, 2006).

[KM, 2006]

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