A writer of wisdom and grit, Glück sets a new course for each collection
- Read Telescope, by Louise Glück, below
Readers who follow American poetry closely noticed Louise Glück in the 1970s. The rest of the literary world mostly took her Nobel prize last week as a surprise. And no wonder. She is not particularly topical, nor internationally influential; like the sadder-but-wiser adults who populate her later work, she can seem to keep her own counsel, to withdraw. That attitude is not so much a limit as a condition for her success, over a lifetime of serious, often terse, introspective, unsettling, sometimes exhilarating work. Like all authors of her calibre she harbours contradictions. Read her 12 collections (and two chapbooks) of poetry for the first time, and they may seem almost all of a piece. Read them again, though, and the divisions pop out: she has said that she tries to change, to challenge herself, even to reverse direction with each new book, and if you go deep enough you can see how she’s right.
Do not begin at the beginning; Firstborn (1969) was apprentice work. Instead, look at poems from The House on Marshland (1975) and the volumes that followed (available in the UK as The First Five Books of Poems). These elegantly laconic pieces portrayed women or girls seeking certainty and stability in a world whose only stable truths were grim. Glück’s version of Gretel, after escaping the witch, cannot stop imagining the oven in which her brother almost died: she feels as if she had not saved him. A poem called “Here Are My Black Clothes” begins: “I think now it is better to love no one / than to love you.” “Love Poem” condemns a lover or an ex: “No wonder you are the way you are, / afraid of blood, your women / like one brick wall after another.”
Glück’s poems face truths that most people deny: the way old age comes for us if we’re lucky; the promises we can't keep
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