Herakles, meanwhile – who's stood, frozen in myth, as an icon of youth and strength for millennia – reappears as Sad But Great, a broken war veteran PTSD-ravaged, "ragged eyes pouring in/ every direction". Sharp stab his face no / longer young no more / beauty impact"). Geryon – now plain G – has grown up and is dealing, wearily, with the consequences: damaged friends, ailing relatives, loss of libido, loss of looks ("Gathering swim / gear in the bathroom he / glances at the mirror. "Call no man happy until he's dead," said Aeschylus in Red Doc>, Carson drives his point home. Carson has taken her demigods and monsters, already decoupled from history, bestowed on them the gift of a modern afterlife – and then focused on the collateral damage.
Geryon falls, hard, for cosmopolitan charmer Herakles, who ultimately ditches him on the agelessly base pretext: "I want you to be free."Ĭarson is grappling with deep time, yet Autobiography of Red remains a straightforward(ish) retelling of a myth Red Doc> is a far more temporally subtle proposition. Her Geryon is a contemporary teenage boy – arty, moody, gay – and though his wings survive the journey, folded away under his shirt, the only slaying that takes place here is metaphorical.
Having drilled down through myth and history, though, Carson's version of the version whisks us back to the present again. There's more: this work, "Geryoneis", was itself a retelling of the 10th labour of Herakles, in which he must slay the red, winged monster Geryon in order to steal his cattle. The book is a sequel, of sorts, to the Canadian poet's 1998 Autobiography of Red – in turn an adaptation of an all-but-forgotten fragment of a work by one Stesichorus, an all-but-forgotten Greek poet.
Start at the very beginning, the song advises – but the quest for a true beginning in Red Doc> is doomed. Where to start: with her antic reworking of Greek mythology? Her exuberant intertextuality? Her formal experimentalism, which leaves swaths of contemporary poetry looking irremediably blah by comparison? That weird angle bracket in the title? Red Doc>, the latest verse-novel from Anne Carson's MacArthur genius grant-endorsed pen, trails so many tempting threads that it is a job to decide which to follow first.
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