This quiet, but steely feat of readjustment to lived experience runs through Glück’s work. She cannot fill in what she knows is there. She draws what she can, but it is white all through, She’s neatly shown a path through the canon for everyone who feels themselves excluded by that white male norm we should be past questioning.ĭescending Figure (1980), another cunningly-appropriated title, reveals some of how this is done – like in the poem Portrait: By doing so she’s already managed, without polemic, to assure several generations of women that their lives are as real, and as mighty a measure of the human, as any man’s. Where, in As You Like It, Shakespeare has Jacques’s famous Seven Ages tell the story of a man’s life with equal lightness of touch, Glück has the confidence to assume that a woman’s experience can provide the human example.

Ripe Peach is published in The Seven Ages (2001), a book I’ve always loved. Through decades of Anglo-American poetry alternating between over-intellection and misery-memoir confession, Glück has continued to write poetry that is accessible, despite its huge sophistication. That single gesture is an inclusive, not exclusive, one. Only the literary allusion betrays the complexity behind the apparent ease: no poet can avoid hearing George Herbert’s “Love bade me welcome…” in the offering, although the reader doesn’t need any such knowledge for the poem to work. This is classic Glück, distilling time, beauty, and emotional ambivalence in a single clarifying gesture. Here she is in the 10-part poem Ripe Peach, on arriving at middle age: She has the extraordinary writer’s gift of making clear what is, outside the world of her poem, complex. You read a passage by Glück and think, Ah yes, of course, this is how it is. But what unites all this work is a quality of lucid, calm attention. The 12 collections (and two chapbooks) of poetry that Glück has published to date vary enormously in style and theme, from the domestic and familial stories of her first books, 1968’s aptly-titled Firstborn and her breakthrough second collection The House on Marshland (1975), to the fabular and increasingly philosophic writing of later work like Averno (2006) – named for the entrance to the Classical underworld – and her most recent collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014).

Perhaps this is why I’m so moved and excited by today’s announcement that the 77-year old American has won the Nobel prize in literature.īut I think it’s much more than this. I have been reading Louise Glück for more than 20 years, longer than the many poets whose star has risen and waned in the meantime longer than I’ve been writing poetry.

Averno by Louise Glück