Short Talks

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of English at the University of Prince
Edward Island.

This highly original book may be viewed from two angles. The first is
content. It would be a cliché, albeit an appropriate one, to
characterize these short talks as “caviare to the general.” But for
anyone with a palate well cultivated by regular familiarity with such
disciplines as literature, history, archeology, painting, and
psychology, they can be savored to the full.

The second angle is style of presentation. Carson writes in the imagist
tradition once promoted by Ezra Pound: always the exact word (not the
decorous); hard, clear, precise images (never indefinite or
crepuscular); metaphors compressed, sometimes into a single epithet;
short sentences. Again, a style for the epicurean scholar to appreciate.
The highly evocative cover depicts a painting of a volcano by Anne
Carson herself.