Talvisia reseptejä kollektiivista

by Louise Glück, Anni Sumari (Translator)

Vuoden 2020 Nobelin kirjallisuuspalkinnon voittaneen yhdysvaltalaisen Louise Glückin (s. 1943) kolmastoista runoteos Talvisia reseptejä kollektiivista (Winter Recipes from the Collective) kuuluu hänen unohtumattomimpiin saavutuksiinsa.

Talvisia reseptejä kollektiivista on kuin kamarimusiikkia, kutsu tuohon äänien valtakuntaan, joka on kyllin pieni että jokainen instrumentti saa sointinsa kuuluville vaimentumattomana, kunnes seuraava ääni poimii sen ja vie mukanaan maailmaan, joka on yhtä aikaa aavemainen, inhimillinen ja esiaikainen. Teoksessa kokonainen äänten kuoro kertoo vanhuuden lukemattomista lahjoista ja menetyksistä, sisaren kuolemasta, takapenkillä kikattavista pikku prinsessoista, hylätystä passista, virkistävän talvivoileivän salaperäisistä ainesosista, auringon läsnäolosta ja kirkkaudesta, jota sen luoman varjon pimeys mittaa.

”Jotkut teistä tulevat tietämään mitä tarkoitan”, runoilija sanoo ja tarkoittaa: jotkut teistä tulevat seuraamaan minua. Hänen äänessään kuuluvat kaikki ikävuotemme, ”kaikki maailmat, jokainen edellistä kauniimpana.” Kukaan muu kuin Louise Glück ei olisi voinut kirjoittaa tätä ihmeellistä kirjaa, eikä runoilija itse olisi voinut kirjoittaa sitä missään muussa elämänsä vaiheessa.

Genres: Poetry, Contemporary, Nonfiction, Nobel Prize, The United States Of America, Adult, American

53 pages, Hardcover

First published October 19, 2021

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

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book contains
only recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring,
anyone can make a fine meal.


(Nara Sarusawa Pond by Tsuchiya Koitsu)

Contemplating aging, companionship, loss, change, acceptance and the winter of life Glück's meditations, lyrically unfolding in a conversational, flowing narrative pace struck me as surprisingly more cheerful and luminous than the dominant dark tones in her previous collection Faithful and Virtuous Night.

Life equals change:

Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected.
Also everything returns, but what returns is not
what went away -

A refreshing whiff of sneakiness and mischief in old age painted a joyous tableau that made me laugh:

Say goodbye to standing up,
my sister said. We were sitting on our favorite bench
outside the common room, having
a glass of gin without ice.
Looked a lot like water, so the nurses
smiled at you as they passed,
pleased with how hydrated you were becoming.

(from 'Winter Journey')

The titular poem that you can read here will stay with me as a recipe to turn to and savour time and again, already sensing it will soon become more and more relatable.

Old people and fire, she said.
Not a good thing. They burn their houses down.

How heavy my mind is,
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface -

Stars gleaming over the water,
The leaves piled, waiting to be lit.
(from Autumn)

Yet, the fire is still burning and the poet continues singing:

Ah, he says, you are dreaming again

And I say then I'm glad I dream
the fire is still alive
(from Song)

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Louise Glück tells us ‘there is no such thing as death in miniature,’ her final collection of poems, Winter Recipes From the Collective, affirms that there is, in fact, beauty in miniature. Composed of only 15 poems over a scant 42 pages, the Nobel Laureate crafts poetic precision across intimate explorations of memory, lightness and darkness, companionship, and the self. ‘Some of you know what I mean,’ she posits, ushering us along with her as we all ‘have begun your own journey, / not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself.’ It is with an inimitable, crisp softness we take the journey through her words. ‘The book contains,’ she writes in the titular poem, ‘only recipes for winter, when life is hard,’ and the same could be said of this volume that acts as a balm on the sores of the soul from chafing against the perpetual changes and sadnesses of existence. In Winter Recipes From the Collective’ Glück once again dives into the depths of the human heart and comes up with shimmering gems of beauty.

A Children’s Story

Tired of rural life, the king and queen
return to the city,
all the little princesses
rattling in the back of the car
singing the song of being:
I am, you are, he, she, it is—
But there will be
no conjugation in the car, oh no.
Who can speak of the future? Nobody knows anything about the future,
even the planets do not know.
But the princesses will have to live in it.
What a sad day the day has become.
Outside the car, the cows and pastures are drifting away;
they look calm, but calm is not the truth.
Despair is the truth. This is what
mother and father know. All hope is lost.
We must return to where it was lost
if we want to find it again.

While this volume is brief, the brevity cuts directly into the deepest recesses of the heart. It moves with a quietude matching the seasonal settings of hushed winter with ‘shadows passing over the snow’ or autumn where ‘the part of life / devoted to contemplation / was at odds with the part / committed to action.’ It is a calm uneasiness, like any confrontation with the self as a series of selves as plot points receding back into the past. In her novel-like narrative in two parts of The Denial of Death, the “I” of the poem is told:

‘I see, he said, that you no longer
Wish to resume your former life,
To move, that is, in a straight line as time
Suggests we do, but rather (here he gestured toward the lake)
In a circle which aspires to
That stillness at the heart of things,
Though I prefer to think it also resembles a clock.’

Change is at the heart of every poem here, moving through memories of being abandoned by a friend over a lost passport or conversations with a sister as time erodes the past, buries the fallen and tosses us toward the uncertainty of the future. ‘Everything is change,’ the speaker is reminded, ‘also everything returns, but what returns is not / what went away.’ A bittersweet reminder, but also one we must all embrace as we head down the road of the self. We make mistakes, we eke our small victories, we wind up unmoored, we are filled with joys, we are filled with regrets, we look for footholds in existence and must let go of the past and face life with fresh expectations. ‘This is why we search for love. / We search for it all of our lives, / even after we find it,’ she contemplates in An Endless Story and perhaps someday, or ‘all too soon,’ we will have ‘emerged my true self, / robust but sour, / like an alarm clock,’ as she concludes the previous poem, Night Thoughts.

‘How heavy my mind is,
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface -’

The pathway to chronicle change is found in our memory, returning us to the moments when our face matched the one in our passport, to the reflections of ‘the way we loved when we were young, / as though there were no time at all.’ It is a lot to confront, but through the poetry in Winter Recipes From the Collective, Glück shows us how such introspections can bring all our selves together to warm one another around the fire of our life. She shows us that life is about change, growth, yearning, and searching, but we must always ‘dream / the fire is still alive.’ May it remain aglow in all our hearts.

4/5

Gradually I wanted only to be with those like myself;
I sought them out as best I could
which was no easy matter
since they were all disguised or in hiding
But eventually I did find some companions
and in that period I would sometimes walk
with one or another by the side of the river,
speaking again with a frankness I had nearly forgotten -
And yet, more often we were silent, preferring
the river over anything we could say -
On either bank, the tall marsh grass blew
calmly, continuously, in the autumn wind.
And it seemed to me I remembered this place
from my childhood, though
there was no river in my childhood,
only houses and lawns. So perhaps
I was going back to that time
before my childhood, to oblivion,
maybe
it was that river I remembered.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book had all kinds of warning signals:

1. Author fresh off of a Nobel Prize for Literature (2020)

2. Top of the line publisher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), hardcover, but only 42 pages long (er, short)

3. Money to be made before the fanfare begins to fare poorly, so let's rush this baby to press before Christmas.

4. Only 15 poems total, making it a chapbook in full poetry collection's clothing.

5. Poet + Name Recognition = a math equation seldom seen.

Despite the blaring sound and spinning red lights, though, I came out the other end (the journey was brief), ran back to START, and journeyed through a second time for enjoyment purposes.

Will wonders never cease. Sometimes books surprise even the cynical.

While the early poems, written in sections and a few pages long, read like fairy tales set in the Black Forest (Hansel, anybody? How about Gretel?), the book's cover and title signal we're far away from that. China, people. Han Shan-like.

These narrative poems don't seem terribly "poetic" so much as succinct (admittedly, being chary with words is in and of itself deemed "poetic") and read like prose paragraphs divvied up into lines and stanzas. I say that because some readers will "minus" you for such.

And the overriding theme is capital-D Death, anyway. Oh, wait. He doesn't do small-case d, does He? Whatever. Our umlauted author (and, for the sake of success and sales and being taken seriously, I'd like to buy an umlaut, Pat, for mine own poetic success... Ken Cräft) is "of an age" beginning to better see the dark at the end of the tunnel.

Most of the middle and end poems (can something this short have a "middle" and an "end") are pithy wonders with neat finishes. In some, the poem's speaker addresses her sister, apparently a comrade in arms (the embracing arms of old age). Here, though, the speaker focuses on Mom and long life:

Night Thoughts

Long ago I was born.
There is no one alive anymore
who remembers me as a baby.
Was I a good baby? A
bad? Except in my head
that debate is now silenced forever.
What constitutes
a bad baby, I wondered. Colic,
my mother said, which meant
it cried a lot.
What harm could there be
in that? How hard it was
to be alive, no wonder
they all died. And how small
I must have been, suspended
in my mother, being patted by her
approvingly.
What a shame I became
verbal, with no connection
to that memory. My mother's love!
All too soon I emerged
my true self,
robust but sour,
like an alarm clock.

Inside Joke #1: "What a shame I became verbal." This from a poet of Nobel proportions and blaring alarms accompanying her new book. Inside Joke #2: If I submitted this poem to a critique group or a professor, I would have been called to task for the beginner's mistake of the line break (L4) after an orphaned indefinite pronoun ("A"). Nobel winners, fully alarmed, can do so with impunity, proving once again that the "rules" and the "experts" in poetry are full of ... oh, wait, this is a "family site"... let's go with "full of themselves," shall we?

Here's another for your amusement:

A Sentence

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 beginning
so much as a sentence.
But it is not the same, my sister said, this ending soon.
There is a question left.
It is a foolish question, I answered.

Again. Short and sweet. Almost anecdotal. Almost like a koan, with the speaker/master addressing her sister/student. Wry, too. Informed by long life and short remaining days. And again, the "no point in beginning / so much as a sentence" a bit of a writer's joke on herself.

Finally, I leave you with "Autumn," a favorite image for the twilight of life. Notice how these little stanzas are haiku-like in nature, fitting the book's topic, title, and themes. It's one of my favorites in this alarming book.

Autumn

The part of life
devoted to contemplation
was at odds with the part
committed to action.

*

Fall was approaching.
But I remember
it was always approaching
once school ended.

*

Life, my sister said,
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind.
Sadly, she went on, the mind is not
there to receive it.

*

The sun was setting.
Ah, the torch, she said.
It has gone out, I believe.
Our best hope is that it's flickering,
fort/da, fort/da, like little Ernst
throwing his toy over the side of his crib
and then pulling it back. It's too bad,
she said, there are no children here.
We could learn from them, as Freud did.

*

We would sometimes sit
on benches outside the dining room.
The smell of leaves burning.

Old people and fire, she said.
Not a good thing They burn their houses down.

*

How heavy my mind is,
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface--

*

Stars gleaming over the water.
The leaves piled, waiting to be lit.

*

Insight, my sister said.
Now it is here.
But hard to see in the darkness.

You must find your footing
before you put your weight on it.


Take those last two lines as advice for the remainders of the day, friends. And say it again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meditative and sometimes quite narrative. The gorgeous cover and the exciting chance to pick up something new of a Nobel laureate didn’t fully pay off in terms of final reading experience
I try to comfort you
but words are not the answer
- Poem

Louise Glück her new bundle feels particularly attuned to winter coming, with a lot of focus on family relations. A poem called The Denial of Death does plays with the difference between tourist and refugee. A Children’s Story seems to be about climate change but most poems are about family relationships, mothers, sisters and children frequently appear as subject matter or perspective. Mortality also peeps it’s head up at times, for instance:

Where did you go next, after those days,
where although you could not speak you were not lost?
Afternoons and Early Evenings

Many poems in Winter Recipes from the Collective touch more on the intimate, for instance:
This is why we search for love.
We search for it all of our lives,
even after we find it.
An Endless Story

A wistful, melancholic atmosphere pervades the bundle, with musings on life spent and gone:
Life, my sister said,
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind.
Sadly, she went on, the mind is not
there to receive it.
…
You must find your footing
before you put your weight on it.
Autumn

I liked reading the bundle but was not particularly emotionally touched or impressed. Like the cover, a Chinese ink drawing, the style is understated and sparse. Ideal to spend an hour with under the blankets, but lacking the sumptuous touches one would expect in the Christmas break so to speak.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected.
Also everything returns, but what returns is not
what went away—
*
snow was beginning to fall,
not fall exactly, more like weave side to side,
sliding around in the sky—
*
That was a bad trade, she said,
the wings for the kiss.
*
How heavy my mind is,
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface—
*
I think this is my second wind,
my sister said. Very
like the first, but that
ended, I remember. Oh
what a wind that was, so powerful
the leaves fell off the trees.
I don’t think so,
I said. Well, they were
on the ground, my sister said. Remember
running around the park in Cedarhurst,
jumping on the piles, destroying them?
You never jumped, my mother said.
You were good girls; you stayed where I put you.
Not in our heads,
my sister said. I put
my arms around her. What
a brave sister you are,
I said.

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

This is the thirteenth collection of poetry published by the 2020 Nobel Laureate and the first after her her award. Having read all of her previous collections this year – I had to buy this from her UK publishers Carnacet as soon as available.

For many of the previous books – although ultimately forming my own views I enjoyed reading critiques, interpretations and reviews by others much more familiar with poetry as a literary medium and Louise Glück as a writer than I am.

Here I felt I was stepping slightly into the unknown – so I supsect this review will evolve over time.

My overall impression is that this is a collection for Glück fans – at times perhaps surprisingly slight (it being 7 years since her previous collection) but with many of her familiar tropes and ideas refashioned (as is very much her style) to reflect her own changing station in life – in this case in perhaps the Winter of her life as she approaches 80

“The Denial of Death” (after the book by the anthropologist Ernest Becker) is a long but fascinating allegorical poem. The narrator is travelling with her friends when she misplaces her passport and ends up staying at a hotel while her friends carry on and then ends up growing old in the hotel alongside its concierge in what I think becomes a metaphor not just for ageing (when memories are perhaps more appealing and definitely more available than the world) but also for the ability of poetry and art to capture (but also possibly substitute) for experience

The concierge I realized had been standing beside me
Do not be sad he said. You have begun your own journey
not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself and your memories

The titular poem – another lengthy one – is another allegory – about a group of elderly men who
every winter collect mosses for their wives to ferment and make recipes, and contains the line at the heart of the collection and I think Glück’s reflections on the difficulties and importance of writing for the hard and late times

The book contains
only recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring
anyone can make a fine meal

A third lengthy and allegorical poem “An Endless Story” is about a woman telling a story in a lecture hall part way through telling a fable – with an audience member offering to finish the story and (perhaps in a metaphor for Glück’s own view of her development as a poet) seeming to imply putting aside digressions around relationships for existential poetry

Clearly, he said, someone must finish the story
which was, I believe, to have been
a love story such as silly women tell, meaning
very long, filled with tangents and distractions
meant to disguise the fundamental
tedium of its simplicities. But as, he said
we have changed riders, we may as well change
horses at the same time. Now that the tale is mine,
I prefer that it be a mediation on existence

But later becoming a meditation on how love is a life-long search “even after we find it”

Autumn – a poem of course which anticipates the approach of winter - contains some memorable lines in ageing

Life, my sister said
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind
Sadly, she went on, the mind is not
there to receive it

And

How heavy my mind is
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface

I look forward to other reviews.

[Atri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I try to comfort you
but words are not the answer;
I sing to you as mother sang to me -

Your eyes are closed. We pass
the boy and girl we saw at the beginning;
now they are standing on a wooden bridge;
I can see their house behind them;

How fast you go they call to us,
but no, the wind is in our ears,
that is what we hear -

And the world goes by,
all the worlds, each more beautiful
than the last;

I touch your cheek to protect you -

***

Everything is change, he said, and
everything is connected.
Also everything returns, but what
returns is not
what went away -

***

The book contains
only recipes for winter, when life is
hard. In spring,
anyone can make a fine meal.

***

Every hour or so, my friend turned
to wave at me,
or I believed she did, though
the dark obscured her.
Still her presence sustained me:
some of you will know what I mean.

***

Look at us, she said. 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.

***

Gradually I wanted only to be with those like myself;
I sought them out as best I could
which was no easy matter
since they were all disguised or in hiding
But eventually I did find some companions
and in that period I would sometimes walk
with one or another by the side of the river,
speaking again with a frankness I had nearly forgotten -
And yet, more often we were silent, preferring
the river over anything we could say -
On either bank, the tall marsh grass blew
calmly, continuously, in the autumn wind.
And it seemed to me I remembered this place
from my childhood, though
there was no river in my childhood,
only houses and lawns. So perhaps
I was going back to that time
before my childhood, to oblivion,
maybe
it was that river I remembered.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

How heavy my mind is,
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface—

So this morning I quickly WhatsApped my friend, who happens to head up The South African Poetry Project (ZAPP), to tell her I had just read Louise Glück’s latest poetry collection, and how wonderful and brittle it was in its contemplation of life and its shortcomings. One of the most striking poems is called ‘The Denial of Death’.

My friend told me Glück had passed away on 13 October aged 80, presumably from cancer. It was one of those spooky coincidences reminding one how short and precious life is, that no one is spared from the ravages of time or illness, and life and love need to be cherished and accepted with humility and gratitude each and every day that is left to us.

I do not want to attempt a review now, but just want to say that if you have yet to discover Glück’s crystalline poetry – meaning how clear and cutting it can be – this is a perfect place to start. It is a short collection, almost a chapbook, and is one of her most accessible and intimate. There is a sense of weariness and exhausted wonder at the bounty and beauty of the world, which one lifetime is not nearly sufficient to absorb.

It is fitting that Glück refers to the Tao Te Ching, a fundamental text of Taoism that promotes the importance of living in harmony with nature, embracing simplicity, and nurturing inner peace.

The book contains
only recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring,
anyone can make a fine meal.

[Vesna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite the prime Glück of The Wild Iris fame, this slender collection nonetheless has all the marks of her unique poetry. While almost all poems were already published in the last three years, scattered across several magazines, there is a unifying whole that resonates quietly of a coming winter, death... yet, despite all the struggles, abandonments, and life as a never-ending puzzle, there is a hopeful note in the last poem, Song.

From The Denial of Death

Do not be sad, he said. You have begun your own journey,
not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself and your memories.
[…]
Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected.
Also everything returns, but what returns is not
what went away—

We watched you walk away. Down the stone steps
and into the little town. 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.
[…]
I could hear the clock ticking,
presumably alluding to the passage of time
while in fact annulling it.

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stihovi otvoreni prema čudu života, utišani ali bogati – neki vedar mrak koji pulsira na oštroj tišini.

Glik ponekad piše kao da bi želela da niko o njenoj poeziji ne kaže ništa. Kao da bi njeno lirsko ja samo volelo da se sakrije iza stiha i legne tu, šćućureno, promrzlo, bez sna.
Lako je to izvesti kada si hermetičan, ali Glik je ovde krajnje komunikativna, jasna.
Ona je pesnikinja koja želi da je razumeju, ali da joj ne kažete.

Smrt, zaborav, ljubav, sećanje. I sve sneg prepokrio.

NIGHT THOUGHTS

Long ago I was born.
There is no one alive anymore who remembers
me as a baby.
Was I a good baby? A bad? Except in my head that debate is now silenced forever.
What constitutes a bad baby, I wondered. Colic, my mother said, which meant it cried a lot.
What harm could there be in that? How hard it was to be alive, no wonder they all died.
And how small I must have been, suspended in my mother, being patted by her approvingly. What a shame I became verbal, with no connection to that memory. My mother’s love! All too soon I emerged my true self,
robust but sour,
like an alarm clock.

[Alan]

The latest collection of poems that Glück has put out. Odd one, as I seem to like the subject matter but be out of sync with the style at the moment. This comes 7 years after her previous collection, a period of time in which she may have felt slumped, full of stupor. Certainly many of the poems feel as though she is attempting to shake herself awake out of a overblown hibernation.

Poems I enjoyed:
- The Denial of Death
- An Endless Story

I appreciate the static energy. I also appreciate the cold. I’ll be back to re-evaluate before long.

[Dannii Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This book contains
only recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring
anyone can make a fine meal."

This contained fifteen poems, each of which felt like quiet contemplations; meditative moments in time persisting on the page. There was beauty and sadness present in equal quantity, even when it was hard to discern exactly where each stemmed from. I adored this small anthology, the snapshots of life it presented to the reader, and how I felt I lived each of them alongside Glück at the anthology's close.

[Jerrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pensive and filled with nostalgic longing

[Boris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Поезия, писана за мен.
5 огромни звезди. 💜

[Yong Xiang · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. best poem: The Denial of Death. excerpt:


Come, he said, taking my arm. And we began
to walk around the lake, as was my daily habit.

I see, he said, that you no longer
wish to resume your former life,
to move, that is, in a straight line as time
suggests we do, but rather (here he gestured toward the lake)
in a circle, which aspires to
that stillness at the heart of things,
though I prefer to think it also resembles a clock.

Here he took out of his pocket
the large watch that was always with him. I challenge you, he said,
to tell, looking at this, if it is Monday or Tuesday.
But if you look at the hand that holds it, you will realize I am not
a young man anymore, my hair is silver. 
Nor will you be surprised to learn
it was once dark, as yours must have been dark,
and curly, I would say.

Through this recital, we were both
watching a group of children playing in the shallows,
each body circled by a rubber tube.
Red and blue, green and yellow,
a rainbow of children splashing in the clear lake.

I could hear the clock ticking,
presumably alluding to the passage of time
while in fact annulling it.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This, her first release since her Nobel Prize win, was my final read of 2021 and my shortest, at 40-some pages; it’s composed of just 15 poems, a few of which stretch to five pages or more. “The Denial of Death,” a prose piece with more of the feel of an autobiographical travel essay, was a standout; the title poem, again in prose paragraphs, and the following one, “Winter Journey,” about farewells, bear a melancholy chill. Memories and dreams take pride of place, with the poet’s sister appearing frequently. “How heavy my mind is, filled with the past.” There are also multiple references to Chinese concepts and characters (as on the cover). The overall style is more aphoristic and reflective than expected. Few individual lines or images stood out to me.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Matthew Ted]

111th book of 2022.

I'd never heard of Glück prior to her reading the Nobel Prize, which is also exciting as you are spoon-fed a new writer to discover. The Nobel is usually quite good at bringing an unknown author (at least to me) to light (though not this year, with Annie Ernaux winning). Glück's poetry is very pared down and in most cases, almost narrative; I had to remind myself I was reading poetry, if it wasn't for the line breaks, in some cases they felt like incredibly abstract short stories. A difficult book to rate, only comprised of 15 poems, mostly revolving around life, death and aging. Though impressed by some of the poems, I also felt disappointed by many of them. Intentionally or not, for me, Glück never quite grasped anything fully, but did leave some echoing impressions. I'm intrigued to read some of her other collections and see how they compare.

[Sammie Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just not be the target audience for this book. Love the cover, but the few poems contained within didn’t speak to me. They were too abstract and I couldn’t feel anything while reading.

[Alexander Carmele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vom Zauber der Kommunikation. Weder schreien, noch schweigen, noch flüstern.
Ausführlicher, vielleicht begründeter auf kommunikativeslesen.com

Louise Glücks „Winterrezepte aus dem Kollektiv handelt von Genesung, Rekonvaleszenz, Abschied und Verlangsamung. Als Stimmungsbild ergibt sich das Vergehen einer sanften Zeit inmitten eines asiatischen Steingartens. Die Sprache ist einfach. Die Worte schnörkellos. Das Druckbild übersichtlich, mehr Weiß, mehr Leerraum, entlastend, so dass die einzelnen Strophen wie ein Flüstern, Wispern im Wind wirken. Das lyrische Ich befindet sich in einer Art Wellness-Tempel mit Concierge, einer Institution, in der es Lehrer fürs Malen, fürs Nachempfinden, für Kalligraphie und Tipps für eine optimale Lebensführung gibt. Gespräche mit einem Abgereisten, mit der Schwester, über die Mutter binden das lyrische Ich zurück an eine Welt, die es so nicht mehr für es gibt.

„Eine Krankheit befiel mich,
deren Ursache man nie feststellte,
obwohl es zunehmend schwierig wurde,
Normalität vorzutäuschen,
Gesundheit oder Lebensfreude -
Mit der Zeit wollte ich nur noch mit denen zu tun haben, die wie ich waren“

Erschöpfung, Atemlosigkeit prägen die Gedichte. Die einzelnen Szenen bleiben nur angedeutet. Blitzlichter von Erfahrungen, Überblendungen, die ihre Zeitebenen wechseln, sich auf Vergangenes, Befürchtetes, gerade erst Erlebtes beziehen. Die Sprache schiebt sich nie in den Vordergrund. Glück spielt sich nicht mit Wortaufbauschen auf. Sie inszeniert sich nicht als Wortschmiedin und Hüterin alter oder schwer verständlicher Begriffsmassen oder avantgardistischer Neologismen. Sie bleibt im Alltagsgespräch, sucht verständige Ohren, freundliches Zuhören, mitteilsames Zusammensein. Zwischen den Zeilen atmet es, bleibt es leer. Sie will mehr sagen, als sie vermag, und deshalb sagt sie immer weniger, um mehr Platz für das zu schaffen, was sich so nicht einfach sagen lässt.

„Während sie [die Erinnerungen] beiseitefallen, wirst du vielleicht
die beneidenswerte Leere erlangen, in die
alle Dinge einfließen, wie das leere Gefäß im Daodejing –

Alles ist im Wandel, sagt er [der Concierge], und alles ist verbunden.
Auch kommt alles wieder, doch ist, was wiederkommt, nicht,
was ging –“

Abschied von einem Geliebten, die Krankheit der Schwester, das eigene Refugium in einem Tempelgarten, die Erinnerung an die Mutter, an das Sprechenlernen fügen sich ineinander und werben für einen zarteren Umgang mit den Dingen, den Menschen, mit der eigenen Ungeduld. Alles erinnert stark an Helga Schuberts „Vom Aufstehen“ und Friederike Mayröckers „da ich morgens und moosgrün. Ans Fenster trete“. Das Wasser ist Gin. Der Schein trügt, aber nicht der Betrug steht im Vordergrund, sondern das Miteinander, das gekonnt dem Anschein Rechnung trägt, nämlich der Höflichkeit.

Auf dass die Worte nicht einschlafen, das freundliche Gespräch nicht verstummt, das Zwitschern und fröhliche Reden bleibt, hierfür plädiert Louises Glück Gedichtband. Gegen das Schweigen, aber auch gegen das Schreien schreibt sie an. Es muss nicht ein Flüstern sein. Es reicht ein Sagen und Zuhören der einfachen Art.

Wer Louise Glück mag, kann auch in die „Svendborger Gedichte“ von Bertolt Brecht hineinlesen, oder den frühen Wladimir Majakowskij, die ebenfalls die Alltagssprache zum Medium ihrer Lyrik erhoben haben, oder gleich zu Ingeborg Bachmann und Sarah Kirsch greifen.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Took photos of almost all the poems in the library copy from which I read. Read at least a third of them out loud to my uninterested yet still, on some level, no matter how minorly, moved mother.

Superbly beautiful works on loss, aging, the value of narrative vs. universalized philosophical writing (aka Glück's reflexive consideration of the value of her own work), aesthetic achievement, failure, etc.

She consistently makes me feel something.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

How heavy my mind is,
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface—

These verses are more social than the previous collection. I believe I preferred the solitude of those, one mind thinking/processing amidst nature. These are more dialogues of meaning, exchanges to weather the passing of time.

[Irena · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,5⭐

[tegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

MINE WILL BE A TRUE LOVE STORY, IF BY LOVE WE MEAN THE WAY WE LOVED WHEN WE WERE YOUNG, AS THOUGH THERE WERE NO TIME AT ALL.
are you actually joking.

[EB · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think I'm the intended audience for these poems, which I suppose is a polite or passive way to say that I don't particularly enjoy or appreciate them. I liked this line from "Winter Recipes from the Collective":

The book contains / only recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring, / anyone can make a fine meal.

And I loved the poem "Denial of Death." That poem made the book worth reading. The way it describes ignoring / mis/renaming a thing.

The rest of the poems, though, are about a topic that doesn't interest me (aging/death) and are... too abstract, I guess. I like heavier poems, where each word is a stone (à la Gary Snyder - "Lay down these words / Before your mind like rocks. / Placed solid"). I prefer physicality.

I'm glad I read these because I'm trying to expose myself to more poetry so I can better find my voice. I'm also glad I didn't read these for a class where I'd have to linger over them and consider them. These poems are not my people.

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

If anyone worried that winning literature's most prestigious prize would in any way lend some rose-colored tint to Glück, rest assured she maintains her uncompromising belief that "Despair is the truth." That said, in the face of old age and certain death, "second wind" moments of fleeting joy and imagination still seem capable to genuinely surprise Glück and (for me, at least) her readers as well.

[kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

nostalgic. i don't normally like very prose-ish style poetry, but this was a perfect balance. almost all of these were very elusive and confounding to me - i'm still not quite sure how i feel about them, confused, befuddled, but the sentiment of the poems linger.

[Jonathan Van der horst · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heerlijk ongecompliceerd complexe, ofwel complex ongecompliceerde gedichten. Smaakt naar meer.

[morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

as the warmth of autumn rapidly fades away, the chill of winter has begun to make an appearance at our doors. louise glück's poetry is as gentle as fresh snow, yet packs a bite like the frost that nips at your cheeks. i've been in a bit of a poetry mood lately as the cold weather has begun to seep in. structurally, glück's collection is minimalist and precise, making it a bit unsettling, but it emphasizes all of the things that aren't said in her poems. an invitation to sit with her in silence. i like how she touches upon chinese culture. maybe i'm just like a pun-sai tree, misshapen, yet still growing.


the book contains only recipes for winter, when life is hard. in spring, anyone can make a fine meal.

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.

[Dorotea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louise Gluck’s poems in Winter recipes from the collective were marvellous. Each is distinct but they all share the same tone or ambience – winter. Winter, which is harsh and cold and soft and silent. Winter is when life is hard, when everything is covered in snow and still, when we are forced to stay inside and reminisce and exchange stories around the fireplace. I could lose myself in all of them.


[Re-read in Feb '24: This time around it's the themes about ageing and death and inward movement that stay with me. Always wonderful.]

[sage short · Rating 5 out of 5]

ok this was so fucking good. first time i ever read louise glück and im obsessed officially