A nne Carson, the Canadian poet who has been awarded this year’s Nobel prize in literature , is an exhilarating choice by the committee. The sheer range of writing she has been producing since the mid-1980s is exceptional: poetry, essays, translations, collaborative artwork, and works that find intriguingly under-explored meeting points between scholarship, graphic design and personal rites of passage.

But open any of these books and most of all it’s the extraordinary tone that strikes you. Carson sounds like nobody else. All her writing has a kind of high austerity. Almost jaunty in its intellectual cut and thrust, it deals with sometimes painful material without sentiment, sometimes even through literal deletions in the printed text. The result is a compression and intensity that is unputdownable.

The entry point

If reading Carson is addictive, the gateway drug must surely be 2001’s The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.…