Ray Pride

Anne Carson's electric language is an affirmation of how it is possible -- imperative -- to portray passion. While the Montreal-based poet attained a balance of pluperfect yet commonplace strangeness in her masterly "Autobiography of Red," the coming-of-age of a small boy who is also a winged red monster, the forceful give-take of the voices in "The Beauty of the Husband," creased with shards of Keats, and the section headnotes that question the very enterprise of her story, truly astonishes.

A thirty-year marriage, riven with affairs and disavowals and reconciliation, is taken down. On the poem's first page, she writes of marriage, "Look how the word/shines." The poet and the lover are one and the same: "If only one's whole life could consist in certain moments./There is no possibility of coming back from such a moment/to simple hatred,/black ink." There are laments and begrudgings, but there is too the celebration of happy and sad, the quotidian and, invariably, the casual sort of emotional cruelty that is always undeserved. It began with Carson's perplexity at Keats' famous maxim, "Truth is beauty, beauty truth." She spins relentless variation, striving to dog the essence from those few words. The husband is leaving again; where, who, unspecified: "If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you./Why./To tell it to./Perfection rested on them a moment like calm on a lake./Pain rested./Beauty does not rest./The husband touched his wife's temple/and turned/and ran/down/the/stairs."

A mirror of language and a dance of desire, the culmination of "The Beauty of the Husband"'s performance takes the breath away. Like an even-more pointillist Ondaatje, Carson creates a world, a shared, difficult, celebratory lifetime with precise idioms, plain yet elusive and sometimes simply utterances that bear narrative velocity, but also the piercing exactitude of the true mot juste, and the telling image that does justice to the knowable world.

"The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos"
by Anne Carson
Knopf, $22, 147 pages (2001-04-05)

Also by Ray Pride

THIS AMERICAN SO-CALLED LIFE
A thirteen-part series, drawn from 2,800 hours of video capturing the lives of fourteen students, their teachers and family, over the 1999-2000 school year at Chicago suburban Highland Park High School, it surpasses its creators' claim that they've made the nonfiction equivalent of "My So-Called Life."
(2001-03-29)

WHOLE CLOTH
Liars, cheats, two-timers, eager-to-please fantasists: And those are the good guys.
(2001-03-29)

COLOR BIND
With "The Brothers," about average, commitment-fearing upper middle-class African-American men, writer-director Gary Hardwick treads all over a number of expectations. Its fugitive theme is loneliness -- the intense fear each of the protagonists, played by Bill Bellamy, Shemar Moore, Morris Chestnut and the priceless D. L. Hughley, have of being left in their world without the possibility of love.
(2001-03-22)

WORDS ON PICTURES
Information wants to be free, runs the Web bromide. All the film magazines and trades and books that I pore over in a given week aren't necessarily free, but there are indispensable Web resources that can keep you as informed as e-mail or gossip does in the real world.
(2001-03-22)

OFF CAMERA
(2001-03-22)

MANNY FROM HEAVEN
(2001-03-08)

RAINSTORMS OF WORDS
(2001-03-01)

MEET JOE BLOW
(2001-03-01)

KNOWING DICK
(2001-02-22)

CROUCHING PRODUCER, HIDDEN EGO
(2001-02-22)

HANNIBAL THE AMICABLE
(2001-02-08)

WATERY, GRAVE
(2001-02-08)

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