The eros aspect

What’s not been touched on yet — the eros of the fragment. Eros, Carson writes in Eros the Bittersweet, is the god of what in oneself seems lost, when momently found in the beauty of another. “All desire is for part of oneself gone missing.” What’s genius in If Not, Winter is, the loss of the beloved object, the imago, that the poems are about, and the lack the poems in their fragmented state endure, are found to be the same lack, suffered here in flesh and bone, suffered there in ink and surface. I put it better in a review of the book some years ago so I’ll just link now to that.