Economy of the Unlost

In March my father passed away, and I understood something that I had previously known, but more shallowly: among its other uses, poetry is a container for grief. In Economy of the Unlost, the poet and scholar Anne Carson examines the ways two poets from vastly different eras and cultures invented new poetic forms for grieving. Born in Greece in 556 B.C., Simonides of Keos was a lyric poet known for his elegies and epigrams. Paul Celan was a Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor who wrote poems in German, the language of his parents’ murderers. Carson has placed these writers “side by side in a conversation and yet no conversation takes place. With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface in which the other may come into focus.” Carson lays a careful trail for the reader, guiding them through the particulars of the circumstances in which each poet was writing. Simonides, the first poet to craft verse for inscription on gravestones, employs a radical concision dictated by economy. Celan, writing in a language whose meaning had been perverted by atrocity, reshapes and excavates words in order to salvage their value. Holding both poets to each other’s light, Carson offers the reader a deeper understanding of one of poetry’s central impulses: to bear that which is unbearable, which all will bear.