I have an inordinate amount of affection and respect for anyone who can speak or translate Greek, Latin and the rest of the ancient tongues. Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, has been responsible for several respected translations of Greek and Roman poetry, philosophy and plays, including her collection of all the known fragments of Sappho, If not, Winter, which I read early last year and found to be the most interesting interpretation of the early poetic forms since Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf. In this collection of (mostly) her own poems and prose pieces, she continues to amaze her readers with the scale of her knowledge. The modern and the historical are blended together in this book, the back cover of which describes the author as stepping into the roles of “Sappho, Catullus and Catherine Deneuve.” Not an easy list of characters to play, n’est-ce pas? And yet all of the poems in this book are original, inventive and live up to the praise on the book-jacket, truly a miracle in the modern publishing industry.

There is a kind of romanticism regarding the early days of literature, and Carson plays off of this. The poems and essays are capable of working together to showcase both the romantic sense of the academic pursuit and the reality behind art’s creation. In “Irony is not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2^nd Draft),” (which is really more of a prose-poem than an essay) Carson imagines Deneuve as a professor of ancient and mostly forgotten languages. And indeed, I can easily imagine the world-famous icy-blonde actress playing the role with the sense of reserved decorum that she has developed in her more recent films. I can see her having the thoughts that Carson places in her head. This is Anne Carson’s gift—she is able to get into the mind of another person, be it an historical figure or an unnamed and unknown producer on a television program. I won’t call it mimicry, it’s better than that. These poems are like a channeling—you feel that the spirits of the people she writes about possess every word.

Other poems spring to the mind, including her wonderfully diverse nine-part poem, “TV Men”, which is divided into several speakers, each representing a particular historical figure or event. It is mostly other poets that she becomes or describes, but Tolstoy, Artaud and Lazarus all make appearances as the unforgettable figures they are.

The singular traditional essay of the book, “Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity,” makes one feel that Carson, in addition to being a great poet, is also a great historian. Here she chronicles the historical depictions of women in the ancient world, most of them negative, some down-right rude by our standards. And yet, there is not much of the typical outcry that comes with such remarks of, “That was a different time but that doesn’t make it right. They were wrong!” that get heard whenever someone discusses gender relations in Rome or Athens. Instead, she leaves it up to the reader to decide who is right and who is wrong. Many of the claims made by the ancients seem absurd, though I could not help but have a sly smile creep on my face when she began to discuss how men were thought of in the writings of Hippocrates and Aristotle as “hot” and women were “cold”, an ancient forerunner to Marshal McLuhan’s ideas of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media by several hundred years. The essay is thoroughly academic and can read like the text of a lecture to be delivered to a class of somewhat bored students; yet I find it to be one of the most interesting essays I’ve read in the last three years.

There are some interesting turns of characters from history, as I’ve said many times before. But one of the most interesting is to compare the different humors and different shades of the two ancient poets, Sappho and Catullus, both of whom Carson writes about and both of whose voices she takes as her own. The voice of Sappho is that of a charming poetess that anyone would want to know more of. The voice of Catullus is that of a rude, obscene and vulgar poet who seems to have written most of his work while liquored up and pissed off. And yet you can believe both of these poems might have come from the real people. Anne Carson’s true brilliance is on display in those two seemingly separate characters.

Guest appearances include Thucydides and Virginia Woolf in short two pieces (arguing about war), St. Augustine, Oedipus, Freud and Emily Dickinson.

The book, though there can be no doubt of the brilliance of the author, is not a strong one, however. While my praise of it may seem slightly odd (gushing at first, I admit, only to be followed by this ‘except…’ moment) it must be said that the very reason it is so original—Carson’s ability to work her way into the minds of other people—is its downfall. At the end of the book, there is a memorial of sorts to Carson’s mother, who passed away before the book was published. This is a moving and unique end to the collection, and yet it causes the reader to have the most doubt about Carson’s talents as a poet. Here she plays around with Virginia Woolf while at the same time claiming to speak as herself. Unfortunately, this results in an unusual turn of events—the reader has no clue whether it is Ms. Carson or Mrs. Woolf who is speaking. Anne Carson’s talents go too far at this point, and leave the reader wondering what exactly it was that they missed.