'Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today.' - Michael Ondaatje
Upon publication of her most recent collection of poems, Men in the Off Hours, Anne Carson was hailed by the New York Times Book Review for her 'great intellectual and emotional knowledge, to every bit of which she brings powerful perception and a freshness as startling as a loud knock on the door'.
In her brilliant new book, as in her acclaimed verse novel, Autobiography of Red, she tells a single story. A long-time love, now a crumbling marriage, unfolds in 29 'tangos' of narrative verse, informed by the romanticism of Keats, the wisdom of the classical world and, most importantly, by Carson's own unique sensibility. The unnamed narrator - sometimes 'I', sometimes 'the wife', speaks of the man she calls only 'the husband', illuminating moments that are by turn sensual, erotic, painful and heartbreaking.
The Beauty of the Husband is a work that explores these oldest of lyrical subjects - beauty, desire, love, betrayal - with freshness and devastating power.