Three Poems and Three Books by Louise Glück
- Meri Utkovska
- Oct 3, 2024
- 7 min read
Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943. She grew up on Long Island and attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Revered by many as one of America’s most gifted contemporary poets, Glück was best known for her poetry’s sensitivity, technical precision, and insight into family relationships, loneliness, divorce, and death.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Glück has written 13 books of poetry, including the collections Winter Recipes from the Collective (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), Faithful and Virtuous Night (FSG, 2014), winner of the National Book Award, and Poems 1962–2012 (FSG, 2013), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as American Originality: Essays on Poetry (FSG, 2017). Today, however, as the sun stubbornly hides under his blanket of fat clouds, and the world hurriedly unravels in the face of another fall, I chose her poems The Untrustworthy Speaker, Vespers ["Once I believed in you..."], and A Summer Garden for a quick, yet incredibly rich dive into her own poetic genius.
The Untrustworthy Speaker
Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.
I don’t see anything objectively.
I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
that’s when I’m least to be trusted.
It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised
for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.
In the end, they’re wasted—
I never see myself,
standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand.
That’s why I can’t account
for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends.
In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless,
we’re the cripples, the liars;
we’re the ones who should be factored out
in the interest of truth.
When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas
red and bright pink.
If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
to the older daughter, block her out:
when a living thing is hurt like that,
in its deepest workings,
all function is altered.
That’s why I’m not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
is also a wound to the mind.
Copyright Credit: "The Untrustworthy Speaker" by Louise Glück, from Ararat. Copyright © 1990 by Louise Glück.
Source: Ararat (The Ecco Press, 1990)
Vespers ["Once I believed in you..."]
Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.
Here, in Vermont, country
of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,
it would mean you existed.
By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist
exclusively in warmer climates,
in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California,
where are grown the unimaginable
apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps
they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see
the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself
to share with John and Noah the tomato crop.
If there is justice in some other world, those
like myself, whom nature forces
into lives of abstinence, should get
the lion's share of all things, all
objects of hunger, greed being
praise of you. And no one praises
more intensely than I, with more
painfully checked desire, or more deserves
to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking
of the perishable, the immortal fig,
which does not travel.
Copyright Credit: Louise Glück, “Vespers [once I believed in you]” from The Wild Iris. Copyright ©1992 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Source: The Wild Iris (The Ecco Press, 1992)
A Summer Garden
1
Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.
I wiped the dust from my mother’s face.
Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.
In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees and shrubbery.
The sun moved lower in the sky, the shadows lengthened and darkened.
The more dust I removed, the more these shadows grew.
Summer arrived. The children
leaned over the rose border, their shadows
merging with the shadows of the roses.
A word came into my head, referring
to this shifting and changing, these erasures
that were now obvious—
it appeared, and as quickly vanished.
Was it blindness or darkness, peril, confusion?
Summer arrived, then autumn. The leaves turning,
the children bright spots in a mash of bronze and sienna.
2
When I had recovered somewhat from these events,
I replaced the photograph as I had found it
between the pages of an ancient paperback,
many parts of which had been
annotated in the margins, sometimes in words but more often
in spirited questions and exclamations
meaning “I agree” or “I’m unsure, puzzled—”
The ink was faded. Here and there I couldn’t tell
what thoughts occurred to the reader
but through the bruise-like blotches I could sense
urgency, as though tears had fallen.
I held the book awhile.
It was Death in Venice (in translation);
I had noted the page in case, as Freud believed,
nothing is an accident.
Thus the little photograph
was buried again, as the past is buried in the future.
In the margin there were two words,
linked by an arrow: “sterility” and, down the page, “oblivion”—
“And it seemed to him the pale and lovely
summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned...”
3
How quiet the garden is;
no breeze ruffles the Cornelian cherry.
Summer has come.
How quiet it is
now that life has triumphed. The rough
pillars of the sycamores
support the immobile
shelves of the foliage,
the lawn beneath
lush, iridescent—
And in the middle of the sky,
the immodest god.
Things are, he says. They are, they do not change;
response does not change.
How hushed it is, the stage
as well as the audience; it seems
breathing is an intrusion.
He must be very close,
the grass is shadowless.
How quiet it is, how silent,
like an afternoon in Pompeii.
4
Beatrice took the children to the park in Cedarhurst.
The sun was shining. Airplanes
passed back and forth overhead, peaceful because the war was over.
It was the world of her imagination:
true and false were of no importance.
Freshly polished and glittering—
that was the world. Dust
had not yet erupted on the surface of things.
The planes passed back and forth, bound
for Rome and Paris—you couldn’t get there
unless you flew over the park. Everything
must pass through, nothing can stop—
The children held hands, leaning
to smell the roses.
They were five and seven.
Infinite, infinite—that
was her perception of time.
She sat on a bench, somewhat hidden by oak trees.
Far away, fear approached and departed;
from the train station came the sound it made.
The sky was pink and orange, older because the day was over.
There was no wind. The summer day
cast oak-shaped shadows on the green grass.
Source: Poetry (January 2012)
Louise Glück: Essential Books
Description
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms
Bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality and with clarity and sureness of craft, Louise Glück's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive. Order the book from Bookshop.
Description
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
A haunting book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes
Louise Glück's thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister's death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts.
"Some of you will know what I mean," the poet says, by which she means, some of you will follow me. Hers is the sustaining presence, the voice containing all our lifetimes, "all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last." This magnificent book couldn't have been written by anyone else, nor could it have been written by the poet at any other time in her life.
Order the book from Bookshop.
Description 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. Order the book from Bookshop.
Comments