RaveChicago ReviewThroughout his poetry collections and in each prose work, Carson has consistently reinvented his forms and techniques ... Each poem contemplates a painting, an object which anchors the poems to their present moment, including the reality of Carson’s terminal diagnosis of lung cancer, which he faced during the writing of these poems ... By contemplating images in familiar surroundings, and by leaving the poems open to the incidentals surrounding these moments of engagement, the poems of Still Life manage to relay the textures of his life palpably ... The moment of reading and the moment of writing are so adeptly intertwined by Carson, with his use of tense and perfectly timed digressions, that the poems appear, at times, to be forming as they are read. The convincing and beguiling immediacy of these poems also seems related to Carson’s heightened intimacy of tone, with attention focused on his home and near surroundings: the combined effect has these poems appear utterly of the moment ... This is a vital collection, brimming with life ... Still Life, incredibly, contains some of his finest work.
