Men in the Off Hours

Anne Carson, the Canadian poet who has been called “a philosopher of heartbreak,” drops a clue to the preoccupation of her fourth collection of verse, “Men in the Off Hours,” in a poem titled “New Rule”: "Not enough spin on it, said my true love / When he left in our fifth year". Much of the book is a sui generis meditation on time. But it’s impossible for Carson to divorce herself completely from a thematic territory she has previously made so startlingly new, and so “Men in the Off Hours” encompasses all of that picnic that time spreads behind itself: life and sex and love and death.