SOURCE: Balmer, Josephine. “Ancient Ladies.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5121 (25 May 2001): 26.

In the following review, Balmer lauds Carson's original poetic voice in Men in the Off Hours and commends the volume for breaking down “barriers between past and present, male and female, literary and visual, translation and original.”

“Save every bit of thread”, the Canadian poet Anne Carson advises the ghost of Emily Dickinson in “Sumptuous Destitution” from her weighty new collection, Men in the Off Hours; “One of them may be / the way out of here.” Women poets throughout the ages have taken Carson's suggestion to heart; stranded without a coherent literary history, without their own spool of wool to follow out of the maze, every scrap of the past becomes important—past lives, past poets, past mythologies, all of which are often acknowledged, imitated, or deconstructed in their work.

Certainly, this new book, which follows Carson's acclaimed...