Louise Glück

 

Review

Marigold and Rose by Louise Glück review – the babies’ tale

The Nobel prize-winning poet’s first novel is a subversive, sophisticated vision of the first year in the lives of twin girls

Louise Glück, Nobel prize-winning poet, dies at 80

Fiona Sampson
Friday 25 November 2022

When the American poet Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2020, the Swedish Academy commended her “voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. They might have added that she makes the individual female experience universal, joining it to the canon of male mythology in ways even her titles make clear. The Seven Ages, from 2001 – a stunning reflection on human destiny – was preceded by both The Triumph of Achilles (1985) and Ararat (1990), for example, and followed by Averno (2005), named after the traditional site of the entrance to hell. While her earlier work explores family psychodrama, these books portray the emotional violence of mid-life. In 13 poetry collections and two volumes of essays, Glück’s emotional intelligence never surrenders to cosy consolation, yet the writing remains exquisitely beautiful.

‘At the end of my suffering / there was a door’ … Louise Glück. Photograph: Susan Walsh

Louise Glück: a poet who never shied away from silence, pain or fear

Her work included long periods in which she wrote nothing – and when she did write, she had little sense that it was hers

 Louise Glück, Nobel prize-winning poet, dies at 80

Colm Tóibín

Tuesday 17 October 2023

 

L

ouise Glück was reticent, careful about what she said. She could be distant. There was always a sense that her real life was lived in dreams and memories, in her imagination, in her time alone. With students, sometimes she suggested that they try silence, not working at all. That, she believed, might be best for someone who was writing the wrong poems or producing too much.

Louise Glück

First fiction work by Nobel prize-winning poet Louise Glück to be published in UK

This article is more than 1 year old

The 64-page ‘prose narrative’ Marigold and Rose: A Fiction – about twins in the first year of life – will be published in October

Sarah Shaffi
Thursday 25 August 2022

The first work of fiction by American poet and Nobel laureate Louise Glück is to be published in the UK later this year.

Louise Glück, poet and Nobel laureate, dies at 80

Louise Glück

Louise Glück, poet and Nobel laureate, dies at 80

By Max Matza

BBC News

Acclaimed American poet and Nobel laureate in literature Louise Glück has died at the age of 80.

She received a Nobel in 2020, becoming the first American poet to win the honour since TS Eliot more than 70 years earlier.

 

Louise Glück

Louise Glück, Nobel prize-winning poet, dies at 80

Pulitzer prize winner and former US poet laureate was known for her sharp, austere lyrical work

Adrian Horton

Friday 13 October 2023

Louise Glück, the Nobel prize-winning author and a former poet laureate of the United States, has died at the age of 80.

Louise Glück / Colm Tóibín on a brave and truthful Nobel winner

Louise Glück

Louise Glück: Colm Tóibín on a brave and truthful Nobel winner

Her brilliantly controlled poems offer a picture of the world as a struggle between ordeal and wonder

Colm Tóibín
Fri 9 Oct 2020 06.00 BST

I

n Stanford in 2008, the Irish poet Eavan Boland told me how much she admired the work of Louise Glück. She took down some volumes of her poetry from the shelf in her office and gave them to me.

That night I read the opening lines of a poem:

I sleep so you will be alive,

it is that simple.

The dreams themselves are nothing.

They are the sickness you control,

nothing more.

It was called A Dream of Mourning. I was amazed by its chiselled, hurt tone, the mixture of what was deeply private and oddly heightened and mythical.

In an essay about Emily Dickinson, Glück wrote: “It is hard to think of a body of work that so manages, without renouncing personal authority, to so invest in the single reader.” Of TS Eliot’s poetry, Glück has observed: “And I suppose that, among sensitive readers, there must be many who do not share my taste for outcry.” And writing about the poet George Oppen, Glück called him “a master of white space; of restraint, juxtaposition, nuance”.

All of which could be said about her own work. Her poems are controlled and highly charged, restrained but also exposed, unafraid of and perhaps also terrified by outcry. Glück has described “harnessing the power of the unfinished”, to create a whole that does not lose the dynamic presence of what remains incomplete: “I dislike poems that feel too complete, the seal too tight; I dislike being herded into certainty.”

They open up a stark space. The sounds in her poems emerge tentatively and then bravely, and sometimes fiercely, from within their rhythms. Glück knows what a tone needs when it seeks to be truthful. She has a knowledge, both baleful and enabling, of how little can be said that is true, and how much dark energy that is then released in the effort to speak. In her poems, tone itself is both held in and released. Her work is filled with voice, often hushed and whispering, as though she is exploring a difficult aftermath or the shape of the soul.

If there is one poem by her that gives us a sense of her great talent and the bravery of her voice, it is the opening poem in her collection The Wild Iris, which begins:

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

I have heard her say that this image was with her for years before she found a place for it. In the sequence of poems in the book, Glück follows nature with a distilled diction, the tone filled with pity and wonder, but also a sense of effort and striving. In all her poetry, we get a picture of the world as a struggle between ordeal and wonder. There is always a sense that the poems themselves are the result, too, of a struggle within Glück’s own imagination for words that are precise but also suggestive, for phrases that are sonorous but hard-edged, too.

It is difficult to think of another living poet whose voice contains so much electrifying undercurrent, whose rhythms are under such control, but whose work is also so exposed and urgent.

THE GUARDIAN

Poem of the week / The Red Poppy by Louise Glück

Poem of the week: The Red Poppy by Louise Glück

This poem by the Nobel laureate is a fierce short parable about environmental devastation

Carol Rumens
Mon 23 Aug 2021 10.07 BST

The Red Poppy

The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.

THE GUARDIAN

Legends of the fall / The biggest books of autumn 2021

 

Louise Glück

Legends of the fall: the biggest books of autumn 2021

by Justine Jordan and Katy Guest

4 September 2021

POETRY

September

All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus
A eagerly awaited collection from the Folio prize-winner explores language, deafness, conflicting identities and the weight of history.

October

Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück
Glück’s first collection since winning the Nobel prize last year is an intimate and haunting work full of “recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring / anyone can make a fine meal”.

December

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
A new collection full of hope and healing from the young American poet who electrified the world when she read “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration. JJ

THE GUARDIAN

Louise Glück / The Garden

 

THE GARDEN

by Louise Glück

Louise Glück / El jardín

I couldn’t do it again,
I can hardly bear to look at it—

in the garden, in light rain
the young couple planting
a row of peas, as though
no one has ever done this before,
the great difficulties have never as yet
been faced and solved—

They cannot see themselves,
in fresh dirt, starting up
without perspective,
the hills behind them pale green,
clouded with flowers—

She wants to stop;
he wants to get to the end,
to stay with the thing—

Look at her, touching his cheek
to make a truce, her fingers
cool with spring rain;
in thin grass, bursts of purple crocus—

even here, even at the beginning of love,
her hand leaving his face makes
an image of departure

and they think
they are free to overlook
this sadness.

Louise Glück / Penelope's Stubbornness

 

Photo by Laura Makabresku

Penelope’s Stubbornness

by Louise Glück

Louise Glück / La terquedad de Penélope

A bird comes to the window. It’s a mistake
to think of them
as birds, they are so often
messengers. That is why, once they
plummet to the sill, they sit
so perfectly still, to mock
patience, lifting their heads to sing
poor lady, poor lady, their three-note
warning, later flying
like a dark cloud from the sill to the olive grove.
But who would send such a weightless being
to judge my life? My thoughts are deep
and my memory long; why would I envy such freedom
when I have humanity? Those
with the smallest hearts
have the greatest freedom.

Louise Glück / Midnight

 

Midnight

by Louise Glück

Louise Glück / Medianoche

Speak to me, aching heart: what

Ridiculous errand are you inventing for yourself

Weeping in the dark garage

With your sack of garbage: it is not your job

To take out the garbage, it is your job

To empty the dishwasher. You are showing off

Again,

Exactly as you did in childhood—where

Is your sporting side, your famous

Ironic detachment? A little moonlight hits

The broken window, a little summer moonlight,

Tender

Murmurs from the earth with its ready

Sweetnesses—

Is this the way you communicate

With your husband, not answering

When he calls, or is this the way the heart

Behaves when it grieves: it wants to be

Alone with the garbage? If I were you,

I’d think ahead. After fifteen years,

His voice could be getting tired; some night

If you don’t answer, someone else will answer.

Louise Glück / A Fable

 

A Fable

by Louise Glück

Two women with
the same claim
came to the feet of
the wise king. Two women,
but only one baby.
The king knew
someone was lying.
What he said was
Let the child be
cut in half; that way
no one will go
empty-handed. He
drew his sword.
Then, of the two
women, one
renounced her share:
this was
the sign, the lesson.
Suppose
you saw your mother
torn between two daughters:
what could you do
to save her but be
willing to destroy
yourself—she would know
who was the rightful child,
the one who couldn’t bear
to divide the mother.

Louise Glück / Parousia

 

Parousia

by Louise Glück

Louise Glück / Parousia

Love of my life, you

Are lost and I am

Young again.

 

A few years pass.

The air fills

With girlish music;

In the front yard

The apple tree is

Studded with blossoms.

 

I try to win you back,

That is the point

Of the writing.

But you are gone forever,

As in Russian novels, saying

A few words I don’t remember–

 

How lush the world is,

How full of things that don’t belong to me–

 

I watch the blossoms shatter,

No longer pink,

But old, old, a yellowish white–

The petals seem

To float on the bright grass,

Fluttering slightly.

 

What a nothing you were,

To be changed so quickly

Into an image, an odor–

You are everywhere, source

Of wisdom and anguish.