Fishing for Amber: A Long Story

"It was long ago, and long ago it was; and if I'd been there, I wouldn't be here now; if I were here, and then to be now, I'd be an old storyteller, whose story might have been improved by time, could he remember it."

So begins the latest work of the writer of whom Charles Simic has said: "He is one of the best poets we have on both sides of the Atlantic and the publication of every one of his books is a major event in both our literatures." In the way it dazzles us with a weave of narratives, Fishing for Amber surpasses Carson's previous book, The Star Factory; in the sheer pleasure it takes in stories it is at least the equal of Last Night's Fun, his first prose work. In form it is a kind of magic alphabet, from A-Z, with the subjects drawn from chillingly comic Irish fairy tales; from Ovid's Metamorphoses; and from the history of the Dutch Golden Age, the time of Vermeer the painter of light and Van Leeuwenhoek the inventor of microscopes. These three strands of fiction? fable? are united by the author's wonder at the preservation and enrichment of stories by time, and the transformation of vision by art.