Louise Glück

The Wild Iris

Louise Glück

• 1993 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
• 1992 LATimes–Poetry finalist
• 1992 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 22.43

The Wild Iris was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1991. Louise Cluck’s first four collections consistently returned to the natural world, to the classical and biblical narratives that arose to explain the phenomena of this world, to provide meaning and to console. Ararat, her fifth book, offered a substitution for the received: a demotic, particularized myth of contemporary family. Now in The Wild Iris, her most important and accomplished collection to date, ecstatic imagination supplants both empiricism and tradition, creating an impassioned polyphonic exchange among the god who “disclose[s]/virtually nothing,” human beings who “leave/signs of feeling/everywhere,” and a garden where “whatever/returns from oblivion returns/ to find a voice.” The poems of this sequence see beyond mortality, the bitter discovery on which individuality depends. “To be one thing/is to be next to nothing,” Cluck challenges the reader. “Is it enough/only to look inward?”

A major poet redefines her task—its thematic obsessions, its stylistic signature—with…

The Seven Ages

Louise Glück

• 2002 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• 2001 LATimes–Poetry finalist
• 2001 NBCC–Poetry finalist
• Score: 18.52

Louise Glück has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle’s metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal and crude. The Seven Ages is Glück’s ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in so doing, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible—an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. Over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up the reader’s spine.

Ararat

Louise Glück

• 1992 Bobbitt Prize winner
• Score: 10.42

 

The Triumph of Achilles

Louise Glück

• 1985 NBCC–Poetry winner
• Score: 10.35

 

Averno

Louise Glück

• 2006 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.56

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück’s eleventh collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is the only source of heat and light, a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time opposing their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without plot or hope, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring presence.

Vita Nova

Louise Glück

• 1999 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.49

Since, 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova—like its immediate predecessors, a book-length sequence—combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring, a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope, brutal, luminous, and farseeing. Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Glück compasses the essential human paradox, a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it.

Meadowlands

Louise Glück

• 1996 LATimes–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.46

In an astonishing book-length sequence, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück interweaves the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of The Odyssey. Here is Penelope stubbornly weaving, elevating the act of waiting into an act of will; here, too, is a worldly Circe, a divided Odysseus, and a shrewd adolescent Telemachus. Through these classical figures, Meadowlands explores such timeless themes as the endless negotiation of family life, the cruelty that intimacy enables, and the frustrating trivia of the everyday. Glück discovers in contemporary life the same quandary that lies at the heart of The Odyssey: the “unanswerable/affliction of the human heart: how to divide/the world’s beauty into acceptable/and unacceptable loves.”