In the following essay, Colombo discusses the range of Carson's readership and the peculiar, postmodern facets of her poetry.

"The Canadian writer Anne Carson is among the most interesting of contemporary English-language poets." So wrote Olive Reynolds in the Times Literary Supplement. The front cover of Carson's book Autobiography of Red offers an encomium from Michael Ondaatje: "Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today."

Carson's books of prose and poetry are issued by major publishing houses in New York and London; she and her work are profiled and praised in leading newspapers and literary magazines; and she has held a series of academic fellowships and received a number of major literary awards. Yet Carson has received little appreciation in her native Canada. As Richard Teleky wrote in the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1997), "That a writer of...