Ravehttps://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n14/stephanie-burt/professor-or-pinheadNox is no ordinary book of poetry: you can tell that much before you open it. The book comes in its own thick box, like a time capsule, or a receptacle for family photos...Opened, the box reveals not a bound codex but a long folded-up page, like a screen or a scroll: it feels not only hand-crafted but archaic, like a saint’s relic ... The aspects of Nox that stand out and lend themselves to memory are not by and large the words that Carson chooses, nor the order in which she puts them (many pages contain none). Instead they are visual, typographical, the material aspects of book design, images, collage ... With its insistence on the visual, the material, the tactile, the circumstantial, on everything and anything but its mere words, Nox thus becomes a book, or an anti-book, about the futility of language in the face of death ... Nox is the ghost of a book ... it is strange and affecting and hard to forget ... it is a moving document, a rapt exploration of a few more or less deconstructive ideas, a marvellous object of manufacture, a long trip through a short poem by Catullus, and a minor, memorable occurrence in the career of a major writer ... For many readers, and not a few editors, Nox and its ‘poetry of a kind you’re not used to’ has turned out to be poetry of the most welcome kind: a work you can admire and interpret simply by opening the box and unfolding the pages; a book of poems you don’t even have to read.
