Nox

“Nox” is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality—bits of handwriting, stamps, stains—add testimonial force: this person existed.
Translation, the act of renaming, is clearly crucial to Carson’s method of coming to grips with loss. The first page is a yellowing, blurred poem in Latin: Catullus’ poem 101, an elegy for his brother, who also died on a distant shore.

Some Philip Glass and a visual.