A review by benplatt
Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Glück

4.0

I always enjoy the opportunity to read through a poet’s work chronologically in this way. As someone who only knew Glück from a handful of anthologized single poems and [b:The Wild Iris|76546|The Wild Iris|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388251429l/76546._SX50_.jpg|74057], my conception of her poetics is radically different after reading this. Now, [b:The Wild Iris|76546|The Wild Iris|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388251429l/76546._SX50_.jpg|74057] feels in some ways like an outlier amid her work – the formal concision that has become a defining characteristic of her writing is consistent, but the profound darkness that permeates her other writing is held at bay, and the heteroglossia as we move between a fairly large selection of speakers, be they flower, human, or divine, in [b:The Wild Iris|76546|The Wild Iris|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388251429l/76546._SX50_.jpg|74057] contrasts sharply with her largely (occasionally relentlessly) internal, intimate, and individualized mode throughout the rest of these collections. [b:The Wild Iris|76546|The Wild Iris|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388251429l/76546._SX50_.jpg|74057] remains my favorite work of Glück’s, but I feel like I better understand her work now. The rare exceptions to her more concise work, especially in later collections such as [b:A Village Life|6100917|A Village Life|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1316635798l/6100917._SX50_.jpg|6278130], are welcome experiments that work particularly well. She seems to have a radically different relationship to the nonhuman world, inverting the traditional deification and separation that other nature poetry projects onto it by offering a benign world in which the fabricated nature of those projections becomes clear if one can pierce the veil of human perception for long enough. For me, these nature poems and her poetry of the self, of isolation and the unbridgeable difference between the self and the rest of the world but the desire that pushes you to cross that gulf, are where her poetry resonates the most, and her grappling with trauma throughout every collection becomes a mode of exploring the roots of her speakers’ isolation and perception of the world in a remarkable way. Which is good, because the self and this lyrical, first-person perspective are maybe what I’d point to as her defining formal mode, unlike what a collection like [b:The Wild Iris|76546|The Wild Iris|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388251429l/76546._SX50_.jpg|74057] might indicate. As far as collections go, I find myself most drawn to her later work (within the parameters of this anthology), particularly [b:Averno|76548|Averno|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1316728794l/76548._SY75_.jpg|793615] and [b:A Village Life|6100917|A Village Life|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1316635798l/6100917._SX50_.jpg|6278130], although [b:The Wild Iris|76546|The Wild Iris|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388251429l/76546._SX50_.jpg|74057] and [b:The Triumph of Achilles|1934711|The Triumph of Achilles|Louise Glück|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387702986l/1934711._SX50_.jpg|132161] are standouts as well.