A review by rachbreads
The First Four Books of Poems by Louise Glück

challenging reflective slow-paced

2.5

I sleep so you will be alive, / it is that simple. / The dreams themselves are nothing. / They are the sickness you control, / nothing more.

Part of my poetry experiment (nothing so exciting, just me reading a ton of poetry to figure out what I like, strengthen my lyric writing muscle, figure out what the poets have to say about the world today) is inevitably reading collections that are not for me and this was....not for me. I have read Louise Glück poetry before (isolated poems here and there) and loved them but I think my problem was this specific collection - first of all it was 4 books in one, and it was just too damn long, and also it was her first four books, and her early stuff is not very good, or at least not to my taste. I found myself doing a lot of skimming and by about halfway through I was really impatient to finish. I'm not totally out on Lousie Glück, if I were to try her again it would be a later collection, or just dropping in on single poems like I had before.