Anne 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.

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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. Don’t be put off by the lengthy subtitle, this auto-fictional account of a breakup is a brilliant, universally recognisable portrait of sexual jealousy. The “tangos”, chapters that move between desire and fury, are written in verse whose twirling, bravura phrases, emotional intensity and sheer speed mimic that passionate dance.

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The page turner

At a time when several other anglophone poets (Les Murray, Derek Walcott) were also trying out the verse novel, Carson transformed it into a form of internal exploration. Autobiography of Red, which she published three years before Beauty, retells the fragmentary classical Greek story of Geryon, making it a parable of otherness that bears comparison to the tragedy of Frankenstein’s loveless creature.

Carson wears her background as a classicist lightly in this story about a young artist trying to find his way in the contemporary world. Her Geryon is also a survivor of family sexual abuse, and his sense of himself as just plain wrong is, again, all too recognisable. But Carson also poignantly attaches it to experiences of coming out, of being differently abled, and of dysmorphia. In 2013 she published a sequel, Red Doc>.

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The most thought-provoking

All of Carson’s work is thought-provoking. Despite the ferocious economy of her writing, it is full of complexity – which it never forces into a resolution. That’s something that, in today’s era of often polarised, simplistic discourse, the Nobel committee seems to be rewarding.

For the reader, it means books that offer multiple and ambiguous meanings and aren’t exhausted by re-reading. Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet: an essay (1986) is a case in point.

This reworking of her doctoral dissertation, though published as a scholarly monograph by Princeton University Press, is so original in its take on the classical Greek notion of eros that it has also become essential reading for poets and artists. In it, she shows how desire, in being about longing, is also about lack. The push and pull that absence creates is a theme that runs through Carson’s work. It is also a fascinating way to think about the desire to make things more generally.

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The most subversive

Among Carson’s collaborations with Robert Currie, the artist who is now her husband, is Nox, a concertina-text-in-a-box. This homage to her lost brother – who at the time had vanished from Canada and from her life – reads as a wonderful, serial collage of memories, visual images and reflections. Playing with print production like this challenges us to see afresh.

Another box, 2016’s Float, contains 12 assorted pamphlets full of fascinating matter. There are poems on various themes, playscripts, a dialogue with Gertrude Stein on Picasso, a prose poem meditation on flight. All the chapbooks (some only a single spread) are sharply engaging.

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The one I return to

If McGill University had not closed its classics department in the late 1990s, when Carson was the departmental director of graduate studies, how much of her poetry would we have missed out on? That’s an imponderable question.

But her work is often at its most exciting when she brings together the forensic subtlety of her classical training with the risky brilliance of her poetry writing. For me, these unite most memorably in If Not, Winter, her versions of Sappho. With the same scrupulous honesty with which, elsewhere, she exposes self-lacerating emotion, here she transcribes everything she, as poet and as scholar, understands to exist within these fragments. The result, like all her work, is both steely and delicate.

• Fiona Sampson’s WaterTango Against Extinction is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.