Louise GlückCritiques

Louise Gluck ponnos diante do noso peor nós, e non pasa nada. Salvo que nos damos conta do que somos capaces de pensar e non dicimos. Pode que a súa sexa unha aproximación científica á súa familia, como unha entomóloga que pode diseccionar a quen, como mínimo, observa, e pode que ame. É crear beleza á vez. Unha maravilla.

Poemario bilingüe que comeza coa historia dun amante despreciable e continúa con historias antigas, sobre o tempo a vida e a morte. A sinxeleza da obra de Glück sempre sorprende

increíble.

Gluck is an amazing conceptual poet. And its here her ideas shine. Gluck tends to be very academic and sometimes inaccessible, however here she bends down the branch for you to pick from. Not every poem was great, and her style is ordinary, but there were a few poems that really shone, and I think they're worth reading and remembering.

Arguments with god and mortality in a garden. The garden is the ubiquitous artifact observed occasionally through a window or from a porch. He appears, sometimes with a rake. But made objects are so scarce that when Presque Isle presents us with a dish a table within walls, a balcony sheet, and more we are overwhelmed with the human world and humanity, ripped like a wild flower from the melancholy contemplation of a brief, sometimes blighted, life.

Loved "Autumn," in particular.½

Some of the poems were a little long for my taste (over 2 pages...) but they were well written. And many of them made me wish I could write poetry like this.

One of my favorites from the collection (a prose poem):


Theory of Memory

Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet
incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious
ruler uniting all of a divided country-so I was told by the fortune-teller
who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps
behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the differ-
ence? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the
rest is hypothesis and dream.

so funny - could give this to almost any of my friends and they would be happy
found used copy Powells for $10.95 - they shelved them after all NEW were sold

reading this in the midst of a slight emotional breakdown was an experience

"No one's despair is like my despair."

Dark.

It's always worth reading a Best American series book, his one no exception.

First reading:
This is a collection of poems I hope to understand some day.

Second Reading, years later:
And still I can’t find the context to understand or to feel this collection of poems, or even know how to approach it.

Much contemporary poetry is private and so inaccessible to the rest of us, but this book doesn't seem like that.
I’ve done research of this celebrated poet, read a few of her other poems, learned about her life, seen some reviews, listened to a podcast, looked up each named plant.
I have felt little bursts of grasp, little bursts of feeling here and there, but so far no message, no thrum.

It’s clear each of the 54 poems is a unit unto itself and also connected to the others.
The poems follow the short growing season, probably of Vermont, from late winter, through spring and summer, into early winter again.

Eighteen plants speak. Someone prays seven morning matins before midsummer, and ten evening vespers after.
Various kinds of gods answer in a dozen poems related to seasons and times of day.
Then there are other titles, some that seem to fit with the rest, some that may be asides. Some of the poems are probably about poetry.

I don’t regret the time I’ve spent on The Wild Iris. This is real poetry. Maybe it’s just not meant to speak to me.

This had been living on my shelves unread for a very long time. I did not love this one as well as The Wild Iris, but then, I have loved few poetry collections that well. This is Glück's first collection, and it is far more opaque than The Wild Iris, loosely narrative but filled with wild references that go unexplained. Still, I couldn't help but feel very fond of Glück, the people in these poems, this collection, for reasons I can't always explain.

I bought this based on a close reading of a single poem on the Book Riot podcast. I knew it was going to be right up my alley and it REALLY was. Musings on religion and existence through the metaphor/reality of gardening, and it ends up blending faith with a sort of naturalistic fatalism and I ate it up with a spoon. I have been sleeping on Glück too long, and I need to read at least one more of her collections this year.

Favorite poems: Matins (p. 31), Midsummer, Vespers (p. 37), End of Summer, Vespers (p. 56)

I appreciated this trialogue between human, nature, and the divine, discussing life lessons intended and ignored.

I was drawn particularly to the parental despair of the divine, the angst of the human, and the zen of the flowers.

I was rather hoping that "American originality" would turn out to be one of those famous oxymorons, like "British cuisine" or "military intelligence", but apparently it's not: in the title essay of this collection of twenty years' worth of prose writings (mostly) about poetry, Glück suggests that originality in the arts in America has to tie into the American imperative of self-creation. Poets have "to break trails, to found dynasties ... to be capable of replication". Whitman, Pound and Dickinson can be revered as founding fathers of one sort or another, but someone like Seamus Heaney would never have done as an American, as Glück considers him inimitable.

The collection continues with a group of other essays on "big topics" in poetry (and a stray 500 words on Thomas Mann, which is all in the magnificently concrete first sentence: "Buddenbrooks ends when there are no men left"). Then there are ten introductions Glück wrote for the winners in "first book" competitions for new poets that she judged, fortunately all well-stuffed with examples so that they make sense as standalone pieces, and finally a small group of slightly more subjective essays on "Revenge", "Estrangement" and "Fear of happiness" in poets.

There's not much clue to Glück herself in these essays, though: a lot of fierce, clear thinking and very pared down prose full of abstract nouns. Blink and you'll have to go back a paragraph to make sense of what you're reading. She approves of poets who go all out in their work, she seems to prefer poems that use complete sentences to sterile grammatical experimentation, and she writes in defence of narrative and humour in lyric verse. She evidently has no time for cliché in her own writing or anyone else's, and she doesn't seem to care much for rhetoric. But the ten introductions cover a very wide range of types of writing, so she clearly values commitment, ability and originality more than conformance to any particular template.

Great critical writing, all about the work with the egos of both the critic and the author firmly relegated to the background.½

i'm going to be in the minority here, i know, but i didn't really like this. i feel like i understand what she was doing, showing the different ways of approaching life and the world; i just didn't like the execution. i haven't read her poetry, but i'm sure that i'd like that much better. this just wasn't for me.

A lovely look at the first year of life of twin girls whose differences complement each other, and the ideas that capture their attention. The author's talent as a Nobel Prize-winning poet shines through with a light, sweet touch.

When I read this book aloud, it's beautiful. The sounds flow and I feel the melancholy and the joy and the hope and the despair of aging. I can't say that I understand all the poems, but the images will stay with me:

"...how merrily you stood on the balcony,
pelting me with foil-wrapped chocolates..."

"I could hear the clock ticking,
presumably alluding to the passage of time
while in fact annulling it."

"...We were sitting on our favorite bench
outside the common room, having
a glass of gin without ice.
Looked a lot like water, so the nurses
smiled at you as they passed,
pleased with how hydrated you were becoming."

"There is no one alive anymore
who remembers me as a baby."

Perhaps the title poem sums up this collection best:

"...The book contains
only recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring,
anyone can make a fine meal."

Winterrecepten van het collectief. Door: Louise Glück. Vertaling: Radna Fabias.

Winterrecepten lijkt quasi moeiteloos qua schrijven én vertalen tot stand gekomen maar wel loepzuiver, vol emotie én puur. Elk woord, elke zin, elk beeld is juist.

Fabias (die zelf ook een geweldige dichter is) vertaalde al eerder Averno van Glück; dat vond ik al heel goed. Maar Winterrecepten is nog veel beter. Soms vond ik het origineel mooier, soms de vertaling. Want ja, dat is het toffe aan deze bundels: je krijgt de Engelse en de Nederlandse versie. Zo kan je vergelijken. ;) Ik begrijp dat dit qua rechten niet altijd evident is maar van mij zou elke vertaalde bundel zo moeten zijn; dat maakt het zo veel boeiender en intenser om te lezen.

De taal, de stijl, de onderwerpen zijn alledaags én verheven tegelijk. Het raakte me op een manier die me soms aan de poëzie van Eileen Myles deed denken. Je wordt op een nonchalante (lijkt het wel) manier recht in je hart geraakt. Prachtig.

Ik hoop dat Radna tijd blijft vinden om te vertalen én eigen werk te maken, beide doet ze geweldig goed. En moge de Arbeiderspers al het werk van Glück zo prachtig blijven uitgeven. Fan!

‘’The streetlights were coming on,
lining the sides of the river.
The offices were going dark.
At the river’s edge,
fog encircled the lights,
one could not, after a while, see the lights
but a strange radiance suffused the fog,
its source a mystery.’’
Cornwall

When you find yourselves in the mystical company of Louise Gluck’s poems, you will be asked to take a walk. A walk that reflects our long journey of Life. The Long Night.

‘’And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated - where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again.’’
Parable

The nights are thoughts. And the thoughts are hearts.

‘’Shadows moving. The ropes
making the sound they make. What you hear now
will be the sound of the nightingale, chordata,
the male bird courting the female -

The ropes shift. The hammock
sways in the wind, tied
firmly between two pine trees.

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine.

It is my mother’s voice you hear
or is it only the sound the trees make
when the air passes through them.

because what sound would it make,
passing through nothing?’’
The Past

The stars are the token of a childhood loaded with obstacles. They are the memories of a family that come alive in the silent night.

‘’Outside, night was falling. Was this
that last night, star-covered, moonlight - spattered
like some chemical preserving
everything immersed in it?

My aunt had lit the candle.’’
Faithful and Virtuous Night

Nights are made of mist and silence as depicted in Cornwall, a poem whose imagery is outstanding. It is a sword in the stone, piercing a heart. Cornwall, London, Montana. The Horse and the Rider, the Cursed Artist. In the night, myths and Life meet.

‘’The street was white again,
all the bushes covered with heavy snow
and the trees glittering, encased with ice.

I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.
It seemed the biggest night I had ever known,
bigger than the night I was born.

I write about you all the time, I said aloud.
Every time I say ‘I’, it refers to you.’’
Visitors from Abroad

Whether in nightly walks, when the echoing silence is there to keep us company, or in the meeting of two strangers in a park, Gluck opens a door to our soul…

‘’I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or, perhaps, once we begin,
there are only endings.’’
Faithful and Virtuous Night

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/

This seems quite a disparate collection of poems with an often very depressive tone, especially about aging. Dreamy images and surrealistic scenes give the whole a light 'gothic' undertone. The prose poems in the beginning certainly complicate the process of getting into the book's atmosphere, but in the second half of the collection Glück's somewhat more classic, short lines of verse were recognizable again. Nevertheless, this seems to me to be one of Glück's lesser collections.

In this collection Glück brings together a number of poems that revolve around life in a village. It is not clear where, but it is certainly not an American village, it has more of a Mediterranean feel. It is one where time more or less stands still, or rather, where youthfulness and hope have departed. Older people mainly live there, and the poet portrays this aging in a poignant way, in many details about everyday life. In at least four places she comes back to the image of the burning of dead leaves, a bad omen indeed. And the closing lines of the poem with the telling title 'fatigue' do not require further explanation:
“The sun goes down, the dark comes.
Now that summer’s over, the earth is hard, cold;
By the road, a few isolated fires burn.
Nothing remains of love,
only estrangement and hatred.”
As in her other collections, the tone of this one is very mundane, very colloquial and descriptive. But Glück maintains this so consistently that it takes on something conjuring and mesmerizing. I don't think everything in this collection is equally successful, sometimes it seems as if some poems have been pasted in. But behind the cool, descriptive tone there is a gripping, sobering message.