“Siren”
Talking of cinematic, this poem from Glück’s 1996 assortment “Meadowlands” borrows delightfully from the world of movie noir to painting the opposite lady in a love triangle: “I grew to become a felony after I fell in love./Earlier than that I used to be a waitress,” the opening stanza reads. The poem continues: “I didn’t wish to go to Chicago with you./I wished to marry you. I wished/your spouse to endure./I wished her life to be like a play/through which all of the components are unhappy components.” If this cheeky swerve into style and character-acting feels surprising coming from Glück, it shouldn’t. For one factor, she all the time had a novelist’s knack for inhabiting the characters in her work (and in reality wrote a spare novel late in life). For one more, it helps to grasp that the e book “Meadowlands” as an entire is a riff on the “Odyssey,” taking Penelope and Odysseus and the epic’s different figures as archetypes for the modern marriage the e book explores. In that sense “Siren” is about, nicely, a siren, of the singing-on-a-rock selection, and we’re again on the planet of mythology and want that Glück wrote about with such authority. This time, she simply occurred to have extra exuberant enjoyable with it. (Learn the total poem right here.)
“Idea of Reminiscence”
Glück’s 2014 assortment “Trustworthy and Virtuous Evening,” which received the Nationwide Guide Award in poetry, dealt as explicitly as any of her work did with themes of demise and artwork, and continued her evolution away from her early confessional poems to a extra imagined, novelistic world that centered, on this e book, on a painter on the finish of his life. It additionally embraced a greater variety of varieties than Glück’s earlier books did, with lengthy traces and lengthy poems (the title poem runs to 10 pages) and a smattering of Zen-like prose poems interspersed all through. “Idea of Reminiscence” is a kind of, and it has the charming and mysterious high quality of a wry fable that reads like a Lydia Davis brief story. The narrator is “a tormented artist, bothered with longing but incapable of forming sturdy attachments,” however “lengthy, way back,” he informs us, “I used to be a wonderful ruler uniting all of a divided nation — so I used to be instructed by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Nice issues, she mentioned, are forward of you, or maybe behind you; it’s troublesome to make certain. And but, she added, what’s the distinction? Proper now you’re a baby holding palms with a fortune-teller. All the remaining is speculation and dream.” (Learn the total poem right here.)
“Track”
That is the ultimate poem in Glück’s last assortment, “Winter Recipes From the Collective,” a stripped-down and death-haunted e book of simply 15 poems that appeared in 2021, a 12 months after Glück had received the Nobel Prize in Literature. It once more takes artwork and demise as its central preoccupations, and this poem — which returns to the terse traces and stark imagery of Glück’s early profession — quantities to a dialog between the ailing speaker and her ceramist buddy Leo, who “makes essentially the most stunning white bowls” and is “instructing me/the names of the desert grasses.” There may be an astringency to the poem (which you’ll learn right here), and a mournfulness; the speaker is aware of she is going to by no means reside to see the grasses in particular person. However there’s additionally a form of hope, through which we see Glück’s earlier craving towards God reworked right into a plangent want for the sturdiness of artwork: “Leo thinks the issues man makes/are extra stunning/than what exists in nature,” the speaker says, and, a couple of traces later, “He’s instructing me/to reside in creativeness.” The poem ends with a imaginative and prescient that casts Glück appropriately within the function of desert prophet, and gives up an ideal elegy in its last couplet:
I can see his home within the distance;
smoke is coming from the chimney
That’s the kiln, I feel;
solely Leo makes porcelain within the desert
Ah, he says, you might be dreaming once more
And I say then I’m glad I dream
the fireplace continues to be alive
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