The First Five Books of Poems

by Louise Glück (Contributor)

The themes of the previous volume of poetry define the tasks of the next for Louise Glück. This collection shows the poet in this evolution. It includes: Firstborn (1968); The House on Marshland (1975); Descending Figure (1980); The Triumph of Achilles (1985); and Ararat (1990).

Genres: Poetry

244 pages, Paperback

First published May 29, 1997

About the author

American poet Louise Elisabeth Glück served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004.

Parents of Hungarian Jewish heritage reared her on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University.

She was the author of twelve books of poetry, including: A Village Life (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.

In 2001, Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection, The Wild Iris . Glück is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award ( Triumph of Achilles ), the Academy of American Poet's Prize ( Firstborn ), as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

Glück also worked as a senior lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, served as a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and taught at Goddard College in Vermont. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teached as the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale University and in the creative writing program of Boston University.

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume was published by the 2020 Noble Laureate's UK publisher - Carcanet Press and includes (as the title suggests) Louise Gluck's first five collections.

it also has a brief introduction where the author sets out her thoughts on each collection - and in particular what she took from each to inform her writing of the next collection.

The collections themselves grow in stature in maturity as you might expect - but 5* for the overall experience of the collection as an insight to the first 25-30 years of the author's work. I have added my reviews of the individual collections below

First Born (1968) - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
House on the Marshland (1975) - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Descending Figure (1980)- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Triumph of Achilles (1985) -https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Ararat (1990) - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Gabriel Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are lovely lines, lovely individual moments in the first books. But The Triumph Of Achilles contains some plain-spoken meditations on death that pinch and prick and Ararat is the kind of text that reduces sibling relationships to rubble. The form ends up at a kind of plain-spoken version of Robert Hass et al (except she knows when to stop whereas Hass will just go on and on and on) but the message is chilling and brutal - to love in a family is to endure pain; death is all that awaits; human relationships are structured by the nature of their misunderstandings. These poems offer cold comfort but compellingly so.

[Elina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been reading this book slowly since I picked it up in Scotland in September and I’ve just finished it now in December in my room. What a pleasure it has been! I’ve mostly read Louise Glück’s work this year and it has been so mind opening. Rest easy, your words will resonate forever.

[Sam Ging · Rating 5 out of 5]

gorgeous, her use of language is sparse, occasionally brutal, but always beautiful.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://winterlief.blogspot.nl/2016/12...

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Objevila jsem Louise díky časopisu Host a jsem vděčná za toto setkání.

Last winter he could barely speak.
I moved his crib to face the window:
in the dark mornings
he would stand and grip the bars
until the walls appeared,
calling light, light,
that one syllable, in
demand of recognition.

[Beau · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought it was fascinating to read Glück's earlier work in a row and see, how she developed as a writer.
I started really getting into it with "Descending Figure" and I also think that one is my favorite out of the collection. "Ararat" was my least favorite, because it was too literal and straight forward for me.
"Firstborn" I didn't vibe with too much, but it was cute.
"The house on Marshland" was the first time I saw some things that I liked that would later shape my favorite collection of hers "The wild Iris", so I enjoyed it quite a bit and finally "The Triumph of Achilles" was all right.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Glück says in Faithful and Virtuous Night, she is torn between a structure of oppositions and a narrative structure, but in The First Five Books, she masters both, the story of a family, across generations, through the conflict of emotions. It's taken me six months to understand how to read Glück, I had many false starts, don't give up, find your way. She's worth every word

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firstborn (1968) --- 3/5
The House on Marshland (1975) --- 4/5
Descending Figure (1980) ---3/5
The Triumph of Achilles (1985) ---3/5
Ararat (1990) --- 5/5

[Sienna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The copy I got out from the library is actually labelled The First Five Books of Poems. Like this version, it contains Firstborn (1968), The House on Marshland (1975), Descending Figure (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985) and Ararat (1990). It smells like dust-gathering crayons that have melted and resolidified. This may have detracted from my reading experience.

The first book did little for me — too many fragments. But I loved The House on Marshland. Favorites include "Gratitude," "Poem," "The Undertaking" and "Under Taurus." And, most of all, "The Pond":

Night covers the pond with its wing.
Under the ringed moon I can make out
your face swimming among minnows and the small
echoing stars. In the night air
the surface of the pond is metal.

Within, your eyes are open. They contain
a memory I recognize, as though
we had been children together. Our ponies
grazed on the hill, they were gray
with white markings. Now they graze
with the dead who wait
like children under their granite breastplates,
lucid and helpless:

The hills are far away. They rise up
blacker than childhood.
What do you think of, lying so quietly
by the water? When you look that way I want
to touch you, but do not, seeing
as in another life we were of the same blood.

Though published the year I was born — surely we should share some kind of bond, this book and I — the third collection resonated with me less. "The Fear of Love," part of "The Garden," is the only highlight I noted. I preferred The Triumph of Achilles, with its predictably classical leanings: the title poem tackles the living and the dead in memory, in story; "Mythic Fragment" transforms pursuit into escape, looking away instead of back. In "The Beginning" (part of "Marathon"), dream logic bestows blood oranges and childhood freedom, if you can call it that, upon the bereft. I particularly liked "The Reproach" and "The Embrace."

The final collection, about being a daughter, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a niece, a cousin: this made me sad and weighed me down with its sharp, sometimes sniping assessments. If they're true... but I hope they aren't, not always, not entirely, and I'm glad my family is nothing like this. I did gasp at three of these poems and wonder: "The Untrustworthy Speaker", "Confession" and "First Memory":

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was —
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

This is a dense compilation, and I'd really only recommend it to those who've already fallen under Glück's spell and are well acquainted with her work, who are likely to get more out of the twenty-two years of love and loss and stylistic development it offers. For everyone else, start with one. Choose it carefully and savor it.