You may already know, in which case good for you. But if you don’t, what line of business would you expect Louise Glück to be pursuing? Even though it means luck and/or happiness in German it isn’t a surname that hints at delicacy, profundity and stylish expression.
Oh heck! You knew all the time, didn’t you? She’s an American poet who won the 2020 Nobel prize for literature: Swedish krona 10m (£ 902,235, $1,221,795). Poetry isn’t all unheated garrets, or a blood-spotted pillow.
To give myself a tiny bit of credit I did ask for a book of her poems for Christmas and Occasional Speeder obliged. And here was another surprise. Poems 1962 – 2012* is no “slender volume”, it’s nearly 1½ in. thick and runs to 634 pages.
And that thickness is a major virtue since it provides a synoptic view of her talent. Perhaps I should say genius. More, it reveals a style of writing that endures and is adaptable to all seasons.
Lines from the first poem (The Chicago Train, 1968):
Across from me the whole ride
Hardly stirred: just Mister with his barren
Skull across the arm-rest while the kid
Got his head between his mama’s legs and slept…
And from the last (A Village Life, 2009)
The death and uncertainty that await me
As they await all men, the shadows evaluating me
because it can take time to destroy a human being,
the element of suspense
needs to be preserved –
The directness, the confident rhythms, the pared-down vocabulary. OK, perhaps I’m stretching a point. But I have read some of the other poems. An individual yet immediately recognisable voice, then, which addresses the world. She’s rich now but I doubt it’s affected her.
*Courtesy: Poems 1962 – 2012. Louise Glück. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
I jumped up and down when Glück won ... over the years, I've come to love her poetry because I see a (what's the word) progression and repetition that evolves into newness (hard to explain), but what I'm trying to express is that reading her stuff in chronological order is extremely rewarding.
ReplyDeleteZu schwer: The language is so clear it's difficult to seize its essence. On the back of Poems 1962 - 2012 Dwight Gardener (NYT) refers to her "supple and prosecutorial mind", as if to prove his education was Ivy League. He adds, her "poems bring with them a perilously low barometric pressure" and yet again it's a hidden agenda: Look at me! I took physics to sixth grade.
DeleteI'm sure Louise Gluck tries hard but the whole point is - it doesn't show in the end product. I don't think Dwight has grasped this.
I was shocked to find this book costs $40 in the USA. It might explain why I didn't buy much poetry back in Pittsburgh and Philly.
How delicious. I'm still wading through Walt Whitman's many versions of "Leaves of Grass". I keep going back to it again and again...perhaps it is my age.
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