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Anne Carson, Short Talks. Toronto: Brick Books, 1992. 64 pp. Short Talks, by Anne Carson, is an intricately woven series of poetic meditations on small gestures, glimpses of stories, and subtly varying tones. The book begins, “Early one morning words were missing,” (9) and Carson evokes the central theme of the poems, absence. In drawing the reader into the world of her poetic understanding, Carson shows immediately that more is less. Eschewing the Freudian analysis in “Short Talk On The Mona Lisa,” she chooses water as a symbolic question to animate that elusive painting relationship:
Absence is called upon to show how the fluidity of the Mona Lisa's strength overcomes the designs of Leonardo Da Vinci. Carson is arguably a feminist poet, but she does not subordinate her poetry to politics because ultimately, for her, the poem stands on its evocation. The female body is a powerful signifier in these poems. "Short Talk On Sleep Stones" invokes the last thirty years of Camille Claudel's life in an asylum (Claudel was a French sculptor who worked from 1884 to 1898 as an assistant to Auguste Rodin). After noting that Claudel broke all the sculpting stone given to her, Carson writes, "Night was when her hands grew, huger and huger until in the photograph they are like two parts of someone else loaded onto her knees" (34). Claudel's hands are both her own and not her own; they have grown through disuse and misuse. But the absence is discovered in the formless broken stones that are buried with these hands, now so gargantuan. In "Short Talk On Rectification," Carson depicts the infamous relationship between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer: "Kafka liked to have his watch an hour and a half fast. Felice kept setting it right. Nonetheless for five years they almost married" (32). Ultimately, it is the body of Felice that overwhelms Kafka, for as Carson writes, "When advised not to speak by the doctors in the sanatorium, he left glass sentences all over the floor. Felice, says one of them, had too much nakedness left in her" (32). This signals the second most pervasive theme of these poems, the devastating plenitude of too much. The voice of the poet is often the key to understanding the emotional contours and textures of a poetic project. In one of the most revealing poems of this collection, entitled "Short Talk On Defloration," Carson takes us deep into her voice:
The emotional tone of this poem is crisp like a slap to the face; one feels the tug of love, the lunge of passion, and the attendant despair. There is so much in a voice calling out for the flowers that have been rudely picked. This world is too much for such a voice. Published in 1992, Short Talks was Anne Carson's first book of poems, and it signalled to the world of poetry that a new and distinct voice had arrived on the scene. Carson's later poetry, in books like Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours (for which she won the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize), The Beauty of the Husband, and If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, return again and again to the themes of absence and overwhelming plenitude that are nascent here. The last poem is entitled "Short Talk On Who You Are."
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