MORE MATTER LESS ART: Finished Anne Carson’s Beauty of the Husband, twenty-nine poems (she calls them “tangos,” which strikes me as prissy) and a coda, about marriage, infidelity, and divorce. What is good in this book is very good; what is bad in this book is truly annoying.

The good: “The husband swallows his ouzo and waits for its slow hot snow inside him.” “Her voice sounded broken into.” “…under a black umbrella/in a raw picking wind.” There’s something like that–some phrase that catches exactly right–on just about every other page. Harsh, physical writing.

The anger and the conversations are very well-written. There’s a three-page exchange between the spouses that starts in fury (“Coward./I know./Betrayer./Yes./Opportunist./I can see why you would think that…”) and slowly collapses into resignation, self-defeating attempts at connection, and artsy, self-dramatizing grandiosity. It adds up to a gripping, sad segment.

The bad: Oy, this book is pretentious! I kept wanting to smack everyone implicated in the poems’ production. Each “tango” (grrr) has an obscure, usually Keats-citing, usually way-too-long title, a hurdle you have to get over in order to get to the poem, like those ugly concrete Jersey barriers they put up around the White House a few years back. There is much much much too much John “The Dying” Keats in this book. I am not a Keats fan anyway (with the exception of “This living hand, now warm and capable,” which is one of the four poems I know by heart) but even if I loved the guy madly I think I would be sick of him after seeing his poetry and (muddled) thinking larded throughout this book. Anyway, too much of this book is the poetical equivalent of a German art-flick.

The philosophy is shaky. This only really gets in the way at the very end (although I suspect it’s also responsible for the surfeit of Keats). I mean, anything that ends, “Here’s my advice,/hold.//Hold beauty,” is not thinking as hard as it thinks it is. The self-centered concerns work perfectly when the poems are describing the anger and betrayal of a wronged wife; not so much when the poems attempt to discern some kind of Meaning In It All.

Overall: TBOTH is a fast read, and well worth the time it takes–those phrases really do linger.