SOURCE: Pettingell, Phoebe. “Meanings for the Millennium.” New Leader 83, no. 1 (March-April 2000): 34-6.

In the following review, Pettingell argues that Men in the Off Hours remains a highly original and coherent poetic work, despite the wide variety of forms in which Carson writes.

It is too soon to tell what the major poetry trends of the 21st century will be. One hundred years ago, W. B. Yeats was still writing airy lyrics. It would be 13 years until Robert Frost wrote A Boy's Life; almost two decades before Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot began to publish at all. Representative poets of 1900 included moody E. A. Robinson, bumptious Rudyard Kipling, and the classicist A. E. Housman, whose combination of irony, cutting wit and pathos created a tone that lasted well into the early decades of the new century. Verse still sang, carried along by flowing meters. Rhyme was a powerful...