SOURCE: Jacobs, Alan. “The Re-Invention of Love.” Books and Culture 9, no. 2 (March-April 2003): 10-13.

In the following review, Jacobs notes that “eros is [Carson's great preoccupation” in If Not, Winter.]

Anne Carson's new translation of the poetry of Sappho [If Not, Winter] seems an act of veneration. Sappho is the most archaic and mysterious, and probably the most celebrated, of ancient lyric poets; later Greeks would call her the “tenth Muse,” She lived in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. on the island of Lesbos, off the coast of Asia Minor, not far south of Troy. Most of her poems, which were always set to music, describe erotic passion and its consequences; many of those poems concern desire for other women. There is a legend that Sappho, desperately in (unrequited) love with the “most beautiful of men,” a dashing sailor named Phaon, threw herself from the cliff of...