Where to start with author Louise Glück
Reads by the 2020 winner of Nobel Prize in literature
Earlier this month, The Swedish Academy awarded this year’sNobel Prize in literature to Louise Glück , a formerU.S. poet laureate. The 16thwoman to win the prestigious prize and the first Americanwoman since ToniMorrison in 1993, Glück is the author of 12 poetry collections and several volumes of essays on literary writing.
“All are characterized by striving for clarity,” Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature, said after the announcement. “Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings is a (theme) that has remained central to her.”
Her themes are universal, covering life and death, nature and history, desire and isolation.
“Louise Glück’s voice is unmistakable,” Olsson added. “It is candid and uncompromising, and it signals that this poetwants to be understood. But it is also a voice full of humor and biting wit.”
If you’re just catching up on a half-century literary career, it might be hard to knowwhere to start. Here’s a brief primer.
“Faithful and Virtuous Night” (2014)
Much of this collection, whichwon aNational Book Award for poetry, is awork of fiction set in the British countryside. The book’s central orator— readers later discover— is an elderly male painter. It’s a book of reflections on mortality and the effect of mourning on art and the creative act. In a poem titled “Afterword,” Glück writes: “Fate, destiny, whose designs andwarn
ings/ nowseem to me simply/ local symmetries, metonymic/ baubles within immense confusion—/ Chaoswas what I saw./ My brush froze— I could not paint it.”
ANational Book Award judge said the collection “emanates from aworld where darkness blurs ordinarily sharp edges around the oppositionswe summon to think our lives— loss and renewal, male and female, the living and dead.”
“Poems 1962-2012” (2012)
The winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2012 offers a complete collection of Glück’s poems to date, beginning with her debut, “Firstborn” (1968), and running through 2009’s “A Village Life.” At more than 600 pages, this anthology is a vast landscape into Glück’s poetic innovation and her pen’s deceptively simple verses that pierce at the heart. Its publication was called “a major event in this country’s literature” by TheNewYork Times and underlinesGlück’s quest to find clarity throughwords.
“The Wild Iris” (1992)
The poems in “TheWild Iris” are about change and rebirth, filtered through the lens of nature. In the title poem, Glück writes about a flower dying and coming back to life. “It is terrible to survive/ as consciousness/ buried in the dark earth,” she writes, and later: “You who do not remember/ passage from the otherworld/ I tell you I could speak again: whatever/ returns from oblivion returns/ to find a voice.”
TheNobel literature committee highlighted another poem in this collection, “Snowdrops,” documenting “the miraculous return of life after winter.” Itwon Glück the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993.
“Ararat” (1990)
Deemed the most “brutal and sorrow-filled book of American poetry published in the past 25 years” by TheNewYork Times in 2012, “Ararat” is a devastating, intimate and semiautobiographical window into the life of a family— a collection of poems that captures amother’s struggle with conveying emotion; the death of a newborn sister; a last visit with a dying father (“Terminal Resemblance”); and the challenges of parenthood.
Memory and pain are unifying themes, highlighted in poems like “FirstMemory”:
“Long ago, Iwas wounded. I lived/ to revengemyself/ againstmy father, not/ for what hewas —/for what Iwas: fromthe beginning of time,/ in childhood, I thought/ that pain meant/ Iwas not loved./ It meant I loved.”
“The Triumph of Achilles” (1985)
The poems in this collection are, in manyways, about possibilities. Glück reimagines ideas about family and friendships, aboutmyth and legend, both Greek and biblical. In the poem“WinterMorning,”Glü ck writes about Jesus Christ: “Today, when Iwoke up, I askedmyself/ why did Christ die? Who knows/ the meaning of such questions?”
Itwon theNational Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 1985.
“The voice in Glück’s poems reassures us that poetry isn’t and never has been explanatory at heart, but can become awonder of spirit and symbol, touching love, passion, loss and suffering without romanticizing those large subjects,” said poetHolly Prado in a review for The Times in 1986. “(It) risks the criticism of being ‘difficult’ in order to send us into our own darkened questions, perhaps to discover our own voices there.”