Men in the Off Hours is a hybrid collection of short poems, verse essays,
epitaphs, commemorative prose, interviews, scripts, and translations from ancient Greek and Latin (of
Alcaeus,
Alcman,
Catullus,
Hesiod,
Sappho and others). The book broke with Carson's established pattern of writing long poems. The pieces include diverse references to writers, thinkers, and artists, as well as to historical, biblical, and mythological figures, including:
Anna Akhmatova,
Antigone,
Aristotle,
Antonin Artaud,
John James Audubon,
Augustine,
Samuel Beckett,
Beethoven,
Bertolt Brecht,
Brahms,
Pieter Bruegel the Elder,
Bei Dao,
Catherine Deneuve,
Jacques Derrida,
René Descartes,
Emily Dickinson,
John Donne,
George Eliot,
Sigmund Freud,
Giotto,
Jean-Luc Godard,
Maxim Gorky,
Tamiki Hara,
Heraclitus,
Thomas Higginson,
Hokusai,
Homer,
Edward Hopper,
Karl Klaus,
Lazarus, Longinus (both
biblical and
literary),
Osip Mandelstam,
Oedipus,
Dorothy Parker,
Ilya Repin,
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Satan,
Socrates,
Thucydides,
Leo Tolstoy, and
Virginia Woolf. The title of the book is taken from a line in its opening essay, "Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War". Carson's interest in technical aspects of television – apparent in the collection's "TV Men" sequence – is said to have been stimulated by her work as a humanities commentator on the 1995
PBS series about
Nobel laureates called
The Nobel Legacy.
Men in the Off Hours includes two personal pieces about the author's parents. Carson's father Robert had
Alzheimer's disease, and the poem "Father's Old Blue Cardigan" deals with his mental decline. Carson closes the collection with the prose piece "Appendix to Ordinary Time", using crossed-out phrases from the diaries and manuscripts of Virginia Woolf to craft an epitaph for her mother Margaret (1913–1997), who died during the writing of the book. ==Reception==