WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
The collected works of the inimitable Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
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.
