Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 6
A Nature Book Reader
JESSICA ANDREWS
Jessica Andrews writes about fragility, language, social class & the body
The Glass Essay by Anne Carson
I like writing about the
natural world that locates
human bodies within it. I like
it when our needs and wants
and hopelessness are reflected
in the sky and the trees and
the water, because that’s what
it feels like to be alive.
The Glass Essay, the
narrator walks along the
Canadian moors in April,
thinking about being trapped;
in her mother’s house, in a
broken relationship, in her
body, in winter, and being
alone, which means being free
to walk at dawn, watching the
changing light.
Carson’s descriptions
of the landscape cut into
my stomach like glass. She
describes ice ‘unclenching’
and dark water ‘curdling like
anger’. The trees and sky
‘carve into me with knives of
light’ and dusk ‘fills the room
with a sea slid black.’
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She writes bodies into
the world and the world into
our bodies. She says, ‘Girls
are cruellest to themselves.
Someone like Emily Brontë,
who remained a girl all her
life despite her body as a
woman, had cruelty drifted
up in all the cracks of her
like spring snow.’ She takes
beautiful things and shows
us their barbed edges, which
feels true of our creaking,
drowning world in all of its
gilded light.
