Anne Carson

Baroque nuns in Naples used to display
a drawing room to their novices
of dead women taking tea and playing
cards - recycled nuns who’d sung the Office.

All men are Epstein’s Island say the mares
of Diomedes, but the Legend
of Not So Good Women makes Shelob’s Lairs
of them, dead in postures for pleasuring

them as if in mockery. Anne Carson,
sharing with us her brother’s archive box,
performed the numbed office of parson,
with Catullus as the text in Nox.

Grief succeeds in Beauty of the Husband.
Man - white switch peeling black, trembling aspen.

Woodford Halse - 19 February 2026

Anne Carson ( b. 1950 ) the distinguished Canadian poet and classicist.

Not all men of course, only European ones in this instance.

One of the difficulties in New Zealand Poetry now is the want of fluencies, of scholarship and intellectual heft and emotional weft for men, such as she brings to bear on us.