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theeuphoriczat's review
4.0
This was TOOO SHORT.
The poems are narrative and conversational. The authorial voice is that of a person with experience of loss or nearing death. You could replace 'winter' for 'death', as it is a season we spend months (our lives), toiling, gathering and preparing for.
There is no doubt that each poem began to prepare me for life's winter. It is a meditation and reflection on birth, comradery, ageing, the passage of time, loss, death, love, existence, the search for fulfilment, devotion, and stillness (either calmness or companionship).
Life, my sister said,
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind.
Sadly, she went one, the mind is not
there to receive it."
From the poem 'Autumn'
"Everything has ended, I said.
What makes you say so, my sister asked.
Because, I said, if it has not ended,
it will end soon which comes to the same thing.
And if that is the case,
there is no point in begining
so much as a sentence."
From the poem 'A Sentence'
"What a shame I became
verbal, with no connection
to that memory. My mother's love!
All to soon I emerged
my true self,
robust but sour,
like an alarm clock."
From the poem 'Night Thoughts'
The poems are narrative and conversational. The authorial voice is that of a person with experience of loss or nearing death. You could replace 'winter' for 'death', as it is a season we spend months (our lives), toiling, gathering and preparing for.
There is no doubt that each poem began to prepare me for life's winter. It is a meditation and reflection on birth, comradery, ageing, the passage of time, loss, death, love, existence, the search for fulfilment, devotion, and stillness (either calmness or companionship).
Life, my sister said,
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind.
Sadly, she went one, the mind is not
there to receive it."
From the poem 'Autumn'
"Everything has ended, I said.
What makes you say so, my sister asked.
Because, I said, if it has not ended,
it will end soon which comes to the same thing.
And if that is the case,
there is no point in begining
so much as a sentence."
From the poem 'A Sentence'
"What a shame I became
verbal, with no connection
to that memory. My mother's love!
All to soon I emerged
my true self,
robust but sour,
like an alarm clock."
From the poem 'Night Thoughts'
sriq's review
"I felt/
something true had been spoken/
and though I would have preferred to have spoken it myself/
I was glad at least to have heard it."
"You must ask yourself, he said, if you deceive yourself./
By which I mean looking at the watch and not/
the hand holding it."
"How hard it was/
to be alive, no wonder/
they all died."
"We are all of us in this room/
still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love./
We search for it all our lives,/
even after we find it."
something true had been spoken/
and though I would have preferred to have spoken it myself/
I was glad at least to have heard it."
"You must ask yourself, he said, if you deceive yourself./
By which I mean looking at the watch and not/
the hand holding it."
"How hard it was/
to be alive, no wonder/
they all died."
"We are all of us in this room/
still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love./
We search for it all our lives,/
even after we find it."
laraamaee's review
4.5
So very tender and beautiful. Thank you Bianca for the gift of this book—I want to write a lot of poems now. Need to read more of Glück’s work.
thrushnightingale's review
3.0
"We are all of us in this room
still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love.
We search for it all of our lives,
even after we find it."
From "An Endless Story"
still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love.
We search for it all of our lives,
even after we find it."
From "An Endless Story"
lazthewhale's review
I dont usually read poetry but that was nice and quiet, I could lean into the stillness.