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Poems 1962-2012
656 pages
A stark, deceptively simple journey through myth, nature, and the paradox of a mortal body producing enduring art.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like surveying a vast, elemental landscape from above, where familiar figures like family members, gardens, and mythic shadows reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable. The pace is steady and deliberate, anchored by a voice of deceptive simplicity that draws you into deep, unspoken fathoms. It is a stark, contemplative experience, balancing the bitter coldness of earthly disgrace with the bright, enduring beauty of new-made things. The mood is both intimate and mythic, weaving personal history with the timeless presence of the moon, a copper beech, or a field on fire. This is a book for readers who seek poetry that confronts the paradox of a fragile, mortal body wresting art that is meant to endure.
- Mood
- mythic
- stark
- elemental
- melancholic
- Tone
- clear
- fierce
- contemplative
- observant
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- mortality and endurance · the physical body · family bonds · myth and nature · artistic reinvention
- The writing
- Deceptively simple and clear lines that plunge into deep, unspoken fathoms.
- The arc
- Moves from the bitter disgrace of earthly barrenness to the enduring beauty of wrested art.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate stark, myth-infused poetry that grapples with mortality and the enduring natural world.
Content notes
- death and mortality
About the book
It is the astonishment of Louise Glück's poetry that it resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape--Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain--persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made. From the outset ("Come here / Come here, little one"), Gluck's voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we "do not see the intervening fathoms."
From within the earth's bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness
my friend the moon rises: she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?
To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.
Description from Open Library.
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