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Vita Nova: Winner of the Nobel Prize
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature In Vita Nova , Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it Since Ararat in 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form that is, according to the poet, Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova-- like its immediate predecessors, a booklength sequence--combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring: a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope; brutal, luminous, and far-seeing. Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Glück compasses the essential human paradox. In Vita Nova, Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that thwart and shape it.
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Louise Glück
95 books2,151 followersAmerican 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 230 reviews
April 22, 2024
Ethereal, dreamlike, dealing with separation, being written after the divorce in 1996 of her husband.
Eurydice and Orpheus, and the relation of mind to the world come back often.
The world
was whole because
it shattered. When it shattered,
then we knew what it was.
- Formaggio
This eighth bundle of Louise Glück puts the focus on rebirth. From a Roman, trying to capture some of the spark of the Greek to a lot of references to Euridyce and Orpheus, Vita Nova is filled with not just references to the classical world but also to the emotions of the poet forging a new life.
Some of the statements are grand an in a way too grandiose for my taste:
I begin now to perceive
the nature of my soul, the soul
I inhabit as punishment.
Inflexible, even in hunger.
- The New Life
Others question the reality of emotion and the relation we have with the past:
Does it have to happen in the world to be real?
…
When I woke I was crying,
has that no reality?
- Castille
Finally love comes back abundantly, unromanticized, as well:
I was afraid of love, of being taken away.
Everyone afraid of love is afraid of death.
…
And the more deeply I felt
the less able I was to respond.
- Timor Mortis
Eurydice and Orpheus, and the relation of mind to the world come back often.
The world
was whole because
it shattered. When it shattered,
then we knew what it was.
- Formaggio
This eighth bundle of Louise Glück puts the focus on rebirth. From a Roman, trying to capture some of the spark of the Greek to a lot of references to Euridyce and Orpheus, Vita Nova is filled with not just references to the classical world but also to the emotions of the poet forging a new life.
Some of the statements are grand an in a way too grandiose for my taste:
I begin now to perceive
the nature of my soul, the soul
I inhabit as punishment.
Inflexible, even in hunger.
- The New Life
Others question the reality of emotion and the relation we have with the past:
Does it have to happen in the world to be real?
…
When I woke I was crying,
has that no reality?
- Castille
Finally love comes back abundantly, unromanticized, as well:
I was afraid of love, of being taken away.
Everyone afraid of love is afraid of death.
…
And the more deeply I felt
the less able I was to respond.
- Timor Mortis
November 7, 2020
My soul dried up.
Like a soul cast into fire, but not completely,
not to annihilation. Parched,
it continued. Brittle,
not from solitude but from mistrust,
[…]
how will you ever again believe
the love of another being?
*
We are all human—
we protect ourselves
as well as we can
even to the point of denying
clarity, the point
of self-deception.
[...]
And yet, within this deception,
true happiness occurred.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly.
Nor does it seem to me
crucial to know
whether or not such happiness
is built on illusion:
it has its own reality.
And in either case, it will end.
Like a soul cast into fire, but not completely,
not to annihilation. Parched,
it continued. Brittle,
not from solitude but from mistrust,
[…]
how will you ever again believe
the love of another being?
*
We are all human—
we protect ourselves
as well as we can
even to the point of denying
clarity, the point
of self-deception.
[...]
And yet, within this deception,
true happiness occurred.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly.
Nor does it seem to me
crucial to know
whether or not such happiness
is built on illusion:
it has its own reality.
And in either case, it will end.
Read
December 27, 2022Glück doing what many have done before her: dealing with the dissolution of a relationship, what life means after, and how to make a fire from the ashes of her love, now long extinct. The Greek references continue here - Orpheus and Euridyce pop on by, as do Dido and Aeneas. I don’t have as close a connection to these characters as I do with those out of The Odyssey, and therefore this will be mentally bookmarked for when my knowledge of Greek literature is strengthened.
I liked these poems:
- The New Life
- Immortal Love
- Earthly Love
- Mutable Earth
Here is The New Life:
I slept the sleep of the just,
later the sleep of the unborn
who come into the world
guilty of many crimes.
And what these crimes are
nobody knows at the beginning.
Only after many years does one know.
Only after long life is one prepared
to read the equation.
I begin now to perceive
the nature of my soul, the soul
I inhabit as punishment.
Inflexible, even in hunger.
I have been in my other lives
too hasty, too eager,
my haste a source of pain in the world.
Swaggering as a tyrant swaggers;
for all my amorousness,
cold at heart, in the manner of the superficial.
I slept the sleep of the just;
I lived the life of a criminal
slowly repaying an impossible debt.
And I died having answered for
one species of ruthlessness.
I liked these poems:
- The New Life
- Immortal Love
- Earthly Love
- Mutable Earth
Here is The New Life:
I slept the sleep of the just,
later the sleep of the unborn
who come into the world
guilty of many crimes.
And what these crimes are
nobody knows at the beginning.
Only after many years does one know.
Only after long life is one prepared
to read the equation.
I begin now to perceive
the nature of my soul, the soul
I inhabit as punishment.
Inflexible, even in hunger.
I have been in my other lives
too hasty, too eager,
my haste a source of pain in the world.
Swaggering as a tyrant swaggers;
for all my amorousness,
cold at heart, in the manner of the superficial.
I slept the sleep of the just;
I lived the life of a criminal
slowly repaying an impossible debt.
And I died having answered for
one species of ruthlessness.
October 12, 2020
No one wants to be the muse;
in the end, everybody wants to be Orpheus.
Valiantly reconstructed
(out of terror and pain)
and then overwhelmingly beautiful;
restoring, ultimately,
not Eurydice, the lamented one,
but the ardent
spirit of Orpheus, made present
not as a human being, rather
as pure soul rendered
detached, immortal,
through deflected narcissism.
I made a harp of disaster
to perpetuate the beauty of my last love.
Yet my anguish, such as it is,
remains the struggle for form
and my dreams, if I speak openly,
less the wish to be remembered
than the wish to survive,
which is, I believe, the deepest human wish.
January 16, 2023
"I slept the sleep of the just;
I lived the life of a criminal
slowly repaying an impossible debt.
And I died having answered for
one species of ruthlessness."
A few days before discovering this anthology, I read Glück's Winter Recipes from the Collective and adored it. It was very autobiographical in nature and I took great interest in learning about the poet's experiences and in discovering the clever wordplay featured throughout it. I assumed his anthology was to be penned in a similar vein but was mistaken.
The contents here are far more abstract in design and, quiet honestly, were harder for me to relate to or explore the messages of. I appreciated the mythological inclusions and found these to be a great joy. They aided in my understanding and immersion but still the anthology, as a whole, had no cohesive theme that I could discern. That is not to say that it lacked one but merely that it needed a reader of more brainpower than my own to find it. I assume other poetry readers would find more beauty here and this is a volume I hope to return to, and better appreciate in the future.
I lived the life of a criminal
slowly repaying an impossible debt.
And I died having answered for
one species of ruthlessness."
A few days before discovering this anthology, I read Glück's Winter Recipes from the Collective and adored it. It was very autobiographical in nature and I took great interest in learning about the poet's experiences and in discovering the clever wordplay featured throughout it. I assumed his anthology was to be penned in a similar vein but was mistaken.
The contents here are far more abstract in design and, quiet honestly, were harder for me to relate to or explore the messages of. I appreciated the mythological inclusions and found these to be a great joy. They aided in my understanding and immersion but still the anthology, as a whole, had no cohesive theme that I could discern. That is not to say that it lacked one but merely that it needed a reader of more brainpower than my own to find it. I assume other poetry readers would find more beauty here and this is a volume I hope to return to, and better appreciate in the future.
April 19, 2023
«You saved me. You should remember me».
Por supuesto, adoro cómo este libro rima con 'Meadowlands', pero diría incluso más: me parece que aquí hay un giro crucial hacia la poesía que Glück escribiría después, hacia esa delicada convergencia entre unos cuantos mitos personales, su perspicacia como observadora de lo cotidiano y la fuerza narrativa de los sueños.
Llegados a este punto, pienso que la poética de Glück es fundamentalmente irónica y honesta, y que a partir de la conjunción de esos dos rasgos en apariencia irreconciliables erige todo su edificio fabulador. Aquí todavía no había desembocado en la pulcritud prosística de sus últimos libros —aún se manejaba en buena medida a través de fuertes imágenes, como letanías, susurros con vocación de permanencia—, pero ya podemos advertir su interés por contarse a sí misma, llegado un punto en el que la memoria se presenta como una herramienta dudosa. La ironía le sirve siempre para no caer demasiado en la autocomplacencia o el sentimentalismo, pero su honestidad es irrenunciable: sabe, en cualquier caso, que ser honesto ya no es más que conservar cierta fidelidad hacia la intuición, ver el relámpago y presentar testimonio.
Aquí Glück se acerca incluso a postular la realidad ontológica de lo soñado. Se pregunta en una ocasión: si sueño contigo, ahora que no estás, y me despierto empapada en sudor, ¿acaso todo eso no es real? Y se responde, desdoblada e incrédula, incapaz de dejarlo morir todo en la gravedad de sus sentencias.
Me parece su libro más conmovedor de todo lo que le he leído hasta la fecha. Es curioso cómo una poeta puede llegar a ser tan limpia, tan cruda y tan plenamente imaginativa al mismo tiempo. Todo ello postrado en un abismo de sencillez.
Por supuesto, adoro cómo este libro rima con 'Meadowlands', pero diría incluso más: me parece que aquí hay un giro crucial hacia la poesía que Glück escribiría después, hacia esa delicada convergencia entre unos cuantos mitos personales, su perspicacia como observadora de lo cotidiano y la fuerza narrativa de los sueños.
Llegados a este punto, pienso que la poética de Glück es fundamentalmente irónica y honesta, y que a partir de la conjunción de esos dos rasgos en apariencia irreconciliables erige todo su edificio fabulador. Aquí todavía no había desembocado en la pulcritud prosística de sus últimos libros —aún se manejaba en buena medida a través de fuertes imágenes, como letanías, susurros con vocación de permanencia—, pero ya podemos advertir su interés por contarse a sí misma, llegado un punto en el que la memoria se presenta como una herramienta dudosa. La ironía le sirve siempre para no caer demasiado en la autocomplacencia o el sentimentalismo, pero su honestidad es irrenunciable: sabe, en cualquier caso, que ser honesto ya no es más que conservar cierta fidelidad hacia la intuición, ver el relámpago y presentar testimonio.
Aquí Glück se acerca incluso a postular la realidad ontológica de lo soñado. Se pregunta en una ocasión: si sueño contigo, ahora que no estás, y me despierto empapada en sudor, ¿acaso todo eso no es real? Y se responde, desdoblada e incrédula, incapaz de dejarlo morir todo en la gravedad de sus sentencias.
Me parece su libro más conmovedor de todo lo que le he leído hasta la fecha. Es curioso cómo una poeta puede llegar a ser tan limpia, tan cruda y tan plenamente imaginativa al mismo tiempo. Todo ello postrado en un abismo de sencillez.
March 8, 2018
My first collection from the prolific Pulitzer winner. Some of the poems are built around self-interrogation, with a question and answer format; several reflect on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The first and last poems are both entitled “Vita Nova,” while another in the middle is called “The New Life.” I enjoyed the language of spring in the first “Vita Nova” and in “The Nest,” but I was unconvinced by much of what Glück writes about love and self-knowledge, some of it very clichéd indeed, e.g. “I found the years of the climb upward / difficult, filled with anxiety” (from “Descent to the Valley”) and “My life took me many places, / many of them very dark” (from “The Mystery”). I also disliked “The Winged Horse,” which starts “Here is my horse Abstraction” and goes on to discuss other constructs. If I were to try something else by Glück I would want a solid recommendation.
Favorite lines:
“I, with my inflexible Platonism, / my fierce seeing of only one thing at a time: / I ruled against the indefinite article. / And yet, the mistakes of my youth / made me hopeless, because they repeated themselves, / as is commonly true.” (from “Unwritten Law”)
On spring: “The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. / Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.” (from “Vita Nova”) & “Spring / descended. Or should one say / rose? … yellow-green of forsythia, the Commons / planted with new grass— // the new / protected always” (from “Ellsworth Avenue”)
Favorite lines:
“I, with my inflexible Platonism, / my fierce seeing of only one thing at a time: / I ruled against the indefinite article. / And yet, the mistakes of my youth / made me hopeless, because they repeated themselves, / as is commonly true.” (from “Unwritten Law”)
On spring: “The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. / Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.” (from “Vita Nova”) & “Spring / descended. Or should one say / rose? … yellow-green of forsythia, the Commons / planted with new grass— // the new / protected always” (from “Ellsworth Avenue”)
October 16, 2020
The Winged Horse
It's ten years ago today you turned me out the door
To cut my feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shore
And I thought about the all in all, Oh more than I could tell
But I caught a horse to ride upon and I rode him very well
He had flame behind the eyes of him and wings upon his side
And I ride and I ride!
I rode him out of Wantage End, I rode him up the hill
And there I saw the beacon in the morning standing still
Inkpen and Hagpen and southward and away
High through the middle airs in the heat of the day
And there I saw the channel glint and England in her pride
And I ride and I ride
And once atop of Lambourne Down, towards the hill of Clere,
I saw the host of Heaven in rank and Michael with his spear
And Turpin out of Gascony, and Charlemagne the lord,
And Roland of the Marches with his hand upon his sword
For the time he should have need of it; - and forty more beside!
And I ride; and I ride!
For you that took the all in all, the things you left were three:
A loud voice for singing, and keen eyes to see,
And a spouting well of joy within that never yet was dried!
And I ride!
It's ten years ago today you turned me out the door
To cut my feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shore
And I thought about the all in all, Oh more than I could tell
But I caught a horse to ride upon and I rode him very well
He had flame behind the eyes of him and wings upon his side
And I ride and I ride!
I rode him out of Wantage End, I rode him up the hill
And there I saw the beacon in the morning standing still
Inkpen and Hagpen and southward and away
High through the middle airs in the heat of the day
And there I saw the channel glint and England in her pride
And I ride and I ride
And once atop of Lambourne Down, towards the hill of Clere,
I saw the host of Heaven in rank and Michael with his spear
And Turpin out of Gascony, and Charlemagne the lord,
And Roland of the Marches with his hand upon his sword
For the time he should have need of it; - and forty more beside!
And I ride; and I ride!
For you that took the all in all, the things you left were three:
A loud voice for singing, and keen eyes to see,
And a spouting well of joy within that never yet was dried!
And I ride!
June 21, 2021
This is the eighth collection by the 2020 Nobel Laureate – one that has some merit but is far from her strongest (not least lacking some depth and simply length).
The collection has at its heart, a narrator starting something of a new life after the end of their marriage. At the start of the book, in the first of the two titular poems that bookend the collection, she is taken back to her childhood and realises that the end of her marriage for all its tragedy gives her the same sense of possibility as when she was a child.
From there her modern day thoughts are mixed with more mythical poem, in what seems increasingly to be Glück’s signature style. In this case one series of poems examine the legend of Aeneas – including one written by Dido; while another longer series look at the legend of Orfeo/Orpheus and Eurydice – which is symbolic of the modern day narrator’s descent and then rise and I think also symbolic of how Glück herself considers the trajectory of her own life and her work – as captured in “Descent of the Valley”
Another interesting poem for me is “Roman Study” – largely I think due to my strong classical preference for the Romans over the Greek, I found it interesting as Aeneas (adapted by the Romans of course as part of their foundational myth) starts first resentful of the Greeks (arguing that ;
but then remarks
Capturing perhaps how Rome while desperate to keep its cultural links to (and claim cultural and rhetorical roots in) Greece quickly surpassed it in ambition, a later poem “The Golden Bough” including:
The collection has at its heart, a narrator starting something of a new life after the end of their marriage. At the start of the book, in the first of the two titular poems that bookend the collection, she is taken back to her childhood and realises that the end of her marriage for all its tragedy gives her the same sense of possibility as when she was a child.
Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly
From there her modern day thoughts are mixed with more mythical poem, in what seems increasingly to be Glück’s signature style. In this case one series of poems examine the legend of Aeneas – including one written by Dido; while another longer series look at the legend of Orfeo/Orpheus and Eurydice – which is symbolic of the modern day narrator’s descent and then rise and I think also symbolic of how Glück herself considers the trajectory of her own life and her work – as captured in “Descent of the Valley”
I found the years of the climb upward
difficult, filled with anxiety.
I didn’t doubt my capacities:
rather, as I moved toward it,
I feared the future, the shape of which
I perceived. I saw
the shape of a human life:
on the one side, always upward and forward
into the light; on the other side,
downward into the mists of uncertainty.
All eagerness undermined by knowledge.
I have found it otherwise.
The light of the pinnacle, the light that was,
theoretically, the goal of the climb,
proves to have been poignantly abstract:
my mind, in its ascent,
was entirely given over to detail, never
perception of form; my eyes
nervously attending to footing.
How sweet my life now
in its descent to the valley,
the valley itself not mist-covered
but fertile and tranquil.
So that for the first time I find myself
able to look ahead, able to look at the world,
even to move toward it.
Another interesting poem for me is “Roman Study” – largely I think due to my strong classical preference for the Romans over the Greek, I found it interesting as Aeneas (adapted by the Romans of course as part of their foundational myth) starts first resentful of the Greeks (arguing that ;
but then remarks
And then it occurred to him
to examine those responses
in which, finally, he recognized
a new species of thought entirely,
more worldly, more ambitious
and politic, in what we now call
human terms
Capturing perhaps how Rome while desperate to keep its cultural links to (and claim cultural and rhetorical roots in) Greece quickly surpassed it in ambition, a later poem “The Golden Bough” including:
And beauty
ran in his veins; he had no need
for more of it. He conceded to other visions
the worlds of art and science, those paths that lead
only to torment, and instead gathered
the diverse populations of earth
into an empire, a conception
of justice through submission …
.. Beauty ran in his veins; he had no need for more of it
That and his taste for empire;
that much can be verified
March 3, 2021
Hay una review aquí abajito, de una tal "Anne", está genial y suscribo todo, excepto lo de conocerla, yo no la conocí.
November 11, 2023
#mulheresnobel
March 31, 2012
Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is meant tenderly.
A slim little book that circles around death, and loss, particularly women loved and forsaken or lost: the voice of the poet herself (presumably), mixed with that of Eurydice, Dido, Penelope, and the men that left them; Aeneas who has enough love already in the very blood that runs in his veins; Orpheus (I have lost my Eurydice, / I have lost my lover, / and suddenly I am speaking French / and it seems to me I have never been in better voice) and the unnamed 'you' that a number of the call-and-answer poems address.
I find Gluck's poems here lurched for me between transcendent and strangely cliched: sometimes the words spring off the page, and sometimes they feel well-used and unremarkable - well-known thoughts delivered in well-known words. And yet a number of the poems did sing out to me, particularly those around Dido. I've always had a soft spot for Dido and been appalled at her fate: a strong women, the leader of her people, horse-traded by two goddesses, finding love in a cave on the mountainside, having a brief period of ecstasy and then having the story come in and rip her love and her life away. It always felt so dreadfully unfair. Why could Aeneas have just not landed his damn ship someplace else?
So, 'The Queen of Carthage'
Brutal to love,
more brutal to die.
And brutal beyond the reaches of justice
to die of love.
In the end, Dido
summoned her ladies in waiting
that they might see
the harsh destiny inscribed for her by the Fates.
She said, “Aeneas
came to me over the shimmering water;
I asked the Fates
to permit him to return my passion,
even for a short time. What difference
between that and a lifetime: in truth, in such moments,
they are the same, they are both eternity.
I was given a great gift
which I attempted to increase, to prolong.
Aeneas came to me over the water: the beginning
blinded me.
Now the Queen of Carthage
will accept suffering as she accepted favor:
to be noticed by the Fates
is some distinction after all.
Or should one say, to have honored hunger,
since the Fates go by that name also.”
And then most of all, 'The Burning Heart'
"... No sadness
is greater than in misery to rehearse
memories of joy ..."
Ask her if she regrets anything
I was
promised to another -
I lived with someone.
You forget these things when you're touched.
Ask how he touched her.
His gaze touched me
before his hands touched me.
Ask how he touched her.
I didn't ask for anything;
everything was given.
Ask her what she remembers.
We were hauled into the underworld.
I thought
we were not responsible
any more than we were responsible
for being alive. I was
a young girl, rarely subject to censure:
then a pariah. did I change that much
from one day to the next?
If I didn't change, wasn't my action
in the character of that young girl?
Ask her what she remembers.
I noticed nothing, I noticed
I was trembling.
Ask her if the fire hurts.
I remember
we were together.
And gradually I understood
that though neither of us ever moved
we were not together but profoundly separate.
Ask her if the fire hurts.
You expect to live forever with your husband
in fire more durable than the world.
I suppose this wish was granted,
where we are now being both
fire and eternity.
Do you regret your life?
Even before I was touched, I belonged to you;
you had only to look at me.
December 7, 2020
svag fyra men ändå fyra
January 13, 2025
How else am I to rate a book that starts with "You saved me, you should remember me"? What is the echo of love if not what Louise Glück writes?
June 29, 2019
It’s interesting to read this post-MFA. Gluck is likely one of my biggest influences to study poetry. I read her in college and was absolutely hypnotized. I would have given anything to have written those poems. Now, ten years post grad school and five books later, I re-read it to see how I’d feel. Many poems still spoke deeply to me in all their haunting sparseness, in their isolating world of doom and wonder. And yet, I feel like if I were to write like this, I’d be treated like a joke. She uses so many abstractions: she frequently talks about intangible things like “the soul” or “the heart,” which grad school trained out of me as cliche. Sometimes the metaphors seem too easy (a bird building a nest in a barren place becomes a metaphor for survival). There’s never any narrative: it’s rooted solely in emotion (another thing workshops basically demanded I stop doing. They kept saying, but what’s the context? But what’s at stake?)
And yet, and yet....where would I be had these poems not entered my life when they did? And how and why do they still sometimes strike like a gong??
That being said, I met Gluck while I was in grad school and nearly cried telling her how much she meant to me, and she was really cold: she just looked at me and said “anne with an e or not?” And then signed my book and said next, without even looking at me again.
And yet, and yet....where would I be had these poems not entered my life when they did? And how and why do they still sometimes strike like a gong??
That being said, I met Gluck while I was in grad school and nearly cried telling her how much she meant to me, and she was really cold: she just looked at me and said “anne with an e or not?” And then signed my book and said next, without even looking at me again.
August 27, 2025
August 2025 | Second Read
Glück’s sentences move with incredible momentum. The details are always building and building, without you ever needing to feel out of breath. For example, this line from her poem “Nest,” after which I may name my home: “Steadily flying around, / patiently bearing small twigs to the solitude / of the exposed tree in the steady coldness / of the outside world.” It escalates without dragging on.
Her speakers are also fluid, morphing from human to myth to tree to dog in a few simple syllables, often inhabiting all such states at once. “Supposing / I’m the dog, as in / my child-self,” she writes in one of the title poems at the very end of the book, “. . . you’ll wake up / in a different world, / you will eat again, / you will grow up into a poet!”
Then there are the dastardly one-liners like “I made a heart of disaster / to perpetuate the beauty of my last love” from “Lute Song,” or “I was never safe, even when I was most hidden,” from “Mutable Earth,” and “We were hauled into the underworld” from “The Burning Heart.”
August 2022 | First Read
Gosh dang it. Who gave this book permission to STARE INTO MY SOUL???
Glück’s sentences move with incredible momentum. The details are always building and building, without you ever needing to feel out of breath. For example, this line from her poem “Nest,” after which I may name my home: “Steadily flying around, / patiently bearing small twigs to the solitude / of the exposed tree in the steady coldness / of the outside world.” It escalates without dragging on.
Her speakers are also fluid, morphing from human to myth to tree to dog in a few simple syllables, often inhabiting all such states at once. “Supposing / I’m the dog, as in / my child-self,” she writes in one of the title poems at the very end of the book, “. . . you’ll wake up / in a different world, / you will eat again, / you will grow up into a poet!”
Then there are the dastardly one-liners like “I made a heart of disaster / to perpetuate the beauty of my last love” from “Lute Song,” or “I was never safe, even when I was most hidden,” from “Mutable Earth,” and “We were hauled into the underworld” from “The Burning Heart.”
August 2022 | First Read
Gosh dang it. Who gave this book permission to STARE INTO MY SOUL???
October 30, 2025
Es el libro en el que más páginas he marcado como importantes. Me ha parecido tierno a la vez que me ha roto un poco y estoy llorando mucho por un perro que no conozco pero que seguro que será un poeta increíble cuando sea mayor. Me aterra pensar que en algún momento podría sentir estos poemas como propios y no como una joya preciosa tras una vitrina.
Además de todo ella tenía razón: No one wants to be the muse/in the end, everyone wants to be Orpheus. Son los únicos versos que quiero poner sin que nadie se moleste por spoilers etc pero de veras que no son los mejores tenéis que leer a esta pequeña artista indie que nadie conoce.
Además de todo ella tenía razón: No one wants to be the muse/in the end, everyone wants to be Orpheus. Son los únicos versos que quiero poner sin que nadie se moleste por spoilers etc pero de veras que no son los mejores tenéis que leer a esta pequeña artista indie que nadie conoce.
January 15, 2022
Mais um belíssimo livro de Glück. É o quinto livro dela que leio. Foi para mim uma grande descoberta. Poemas como "Unwritten law", "Lute song" ou "Immortal love" são inquestionavelmente supremos. Este é um livro dedicado ao amor. Noutros, temos a questão do tempo, da realidade e do sonho (aqui também), da família, da infância. Mas este é muito mais intimista e, por isso, tem um tom vulnerável.
Além das referências clássicas, a Europa, em especial a Espanha e a Itália, ocupa um lugar de um imaginário passional assinalável. E depois, há a dor do amor ressuscitado. O poema "Lament" dói de tão belo.
Ah, e a tradução de Ana Luísa Amaral é genial.
Além das referências clássicas, a Europa, em especial a Espanha e a Itália, ocupa um lugar de um imaginário passional assinalável. E depois, há a dor do amor ressuscitado. O poema "Lament" dói de tão belo.
Ah, e a tradução de Ana Luísa Amaral é genial.
Read
August 11, 2024“Laughter. Because the air is full of apple blossoms.”
May 5, 2025
3.5* rounded down
Glück reminds me of Hamlet, in that she is never completely transparent with us. The rawness is held at arm's length.
But goddamn do some of these poems strike particularly well for where I'm at in life right now.
Best read in spring.
Glück reminds me of Hamlet, in that she is never completely transparent with us. The rawness is held at arm's length.
But goddamn do some of these poems strike particularly well for where I'm at in life right now.
Best read in spring.
May 23, 2022
a very light read but required patient concentration (bc glück is way more educated/eloquent than me)
themes i enjoyed:
- time (passing) (childhood/age)
- waking (up from sleep)
- italy (subtle)
- motif: orpheus & eurydice = her divorce (tip for reading poetry: research poet’s personal life)
- other greek allusion e.g. Dido queen of carthage (rip!)
themes i am not sure if i enjoyed:
- repetition of questions
- hunger / fire (too subtle)
2 lines i liked (better read within the context of the poem):
- “but to live with human faithlessness/ is another matter.” (eurydice)
- “in my life, i was trying to be/ a witness not a theorist.” (nest)
themes i enjoyed:
- time (passing) (childhood/age)
- waking (up from sleep)
- italy (subtle)
- motif: orpheus & eurydice = her divorce (tip for reading poetry: research poet’s personal life)
- other greek allusion e.g. Dido queen of carthage (rip!)
themes i am not sure if i enjoyed:
- repetition of questions
- hunger / fire (too subtle)
2 lines i liked (better read within the context of the poem):
- “but to live with human faithlessness/ is another matter.” (eurydice)
- “in my life, i was trying to be/ a witness not a theorist.” (nest)
December 10, 2020
3.5
Cuando se anunció el Nobel 2020 muchos nos sorprendimos de la ganadora. Muy pocos la conocían y otro puñado aún menor la había leído.
Una imagen recurrente se figuraba en mi mente cuando leía este libro: un paisaje otoñal con esas hojas húmedas echándose a perder lentamente sobre el piso. La poesía de Glück es austera, aquí no hay adornos ni barroquismos.
“Te arrepientes de tu vida?
Aún antes de que me miraras, era tuya;
solo tenías que mirarme.”
Cuando se anunció el Nobel 2020 muchos nos sorprendimos de la ganadora. Muy pocos la conocían y otro puñado aún menor la había leído.
Una imagen recurrente se figuraba en mi mente cuando leía este libro: un paisaje otoñal con esas hojas húmedas echándose a perder lentamente sobre el piso. La poesía de Glück es austera, aquí no hay adornos ni barroquismos.
“Te arrepientes de tu vida?
Aún antes de que me miraras, era tuya;
solo tenías que mirarme.”
July 10, 2023
you saved me you should remember me
halfway through the collection, the conceit of orpheus and eurydice's relationship is introduced, framing the collection and giving new context for the preceding poems. the collection is bookended by two poems both using the elegiac refrain
you saved me you should remember me , which morphs into
you changed me you should remember me , a very ovidian turn
halfway through the collection, the conceit of orpheus and eurydice's relationship is introduced, framing the collection and giving new context for the preceding poems. the collection is bookended by two poems both using the elegiac refrain
you saved me you should remember me , which morphs into
you changed me you should remember me , a very ovidian turn
February 16, 2024
Por supuesto que Louise Glück tiene un poema en el que cita el verso “parcere subiectis et debellare superbos”, y por supuesto que está en este libro, en el que hace suyos los libros IV y VI, con pira funeraria y descenso a los infiernos incluidos. De ambos lugares sale, no obstante, triunfante, no sin antes cuestionarse lo real del sueño y lo onírico de la realidad. Increíble lectura.
September 9, 2023
Powerful acceptance of ending and beginning. Very moving
August 24, 2024
Some standout lines as always, but I’m beginning to become disinterested in Glück’s work. It’s like I’m hopelessly waiting for SOMETHING to get just that tiny bit better.
April 9, 2025
“I walked out of the fire alive;
how can that be?“
how can that be?“
October 28, 2024
4,5
my soul withered and shrank. / the body became for it too large a garment. / and when hope was returned to me / it was another hope entirely.
my soul withered and shrank. / the body became for it too large a garment. / and when hope was returned to me / it was another hope entirely.
April 13, 2024
April 2024: I veered from chronology to read this collection last from Glück's oeuvre because it will never not make me emotional. It was gorgeous rereading this in the sun today by the Seine, passed by preening swans. This April, the conclusion of the first poem has been ringing in my head: "Surely spring has been returned to me, this time / not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet / it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly" (Vita Nova). The gap between last spring and this spring is vast, but beauty remains. "I have been lifted and carried far away / into a luminous city."
October 2023: "And yet, within this deception, / true happiness occurred. / So that I believe I would / repeat these errors exactly. / Nor does it seem to me / crucial to know / whether or not such happiness / is built on illusion: / it has its own reality" (Earthly Love, 24-25).
I hope to return to this collection for the rest of my life, in fondness or in times of woe. Glück was already on my mind persistently this month (for she is intertwined with my notion of October), but she has been even more present after the news of her recent passing. May she rest in peace. The poetry world has suffered the loss of a thrillingly original voice. Yet her prolific words will live on and on, nestled in the heart. It is difficult to think of an author who has influenced my writing more.
This text still feels fresh each time I approach it—a miracle, a mystery. Always healing.
"I asked the Fates / to permit him to return my passion, / even for a short time. What difference / between that and a lifetime: in truth, in such moments, / they are the same, they are both eternity. / I was given a great gift / which I attempted to increase, to prolong. / Aeneas came to me over the water: the beginning / blinded me" (The Queen of Carthage, 5).
May 2022: "Surely spring has been returned to me, this time / not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet / it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly" (Vita Nova, 2).
Rereading Vita Nova for the fourth time on a sentimental day after a week of personal and collective loss, and, again, this poetry collection pierces my heart like no other. Memory and mythology and the changing of the seasons, all conveyed with lyrical precision. This book is "a mystery that has become restful" (46)—how sweet and true and astonishing that is. What a privilege to be alive at the same time as Glück; her poetics have influenced me deeply.
"You changed me, you should remember me. / I remember I had gone out / to walk in the garden. As before into / the streets of the city, into / the bedroom of that first apartment. / And yes, I was alone; / how could I not be?" (Seizure, 45).
October 2023: "And yet, within this deception, / true happiness occurred. / So that I believe I would / repeat these errors exactly. / Nor does it seem to me / crucial to know / whether or not such happiness / is built on illusion: / it has its own reality" (Earthly Love, 24-25).
I hope to return to this collection for the rest of my life, in fondness or in times of woe. Glück was already on my mind persistently this month (for she is intertwined with my notion of October), but she has been even more present after the news of her recent passing. May she rest in peace. The poetry world has suffered the loss of a thrillingly original voice. Yet her prolific words will live on and on, nestled in the heart. It is difficult to think of an author who has influenced my writing more.
This text still feels fresh each time I approach it—a miracle, a mystery. Always healing.
"I asked the Fates / to permit him to return my passion, / even for a short time. What difference / between that and a lifetime: in truth, in such moments, / they are the same, they are both eternity. / I was given a great gift / which I attempted to increase, to prolong. / Aeneas came to me over the water: the beginning / blinded me" (The Queen of Carthage, 5).
May 2022: "Surely spring has been returned to me, this time / not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet / it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly" (Vita Nova, 2).
Rereading Vita Nova for the fourth time on a sentimental day after a week of personal and collective loss, and, again, this poetry collection pierces my heart like no other. Memory and mythology and the changing of the seasons, all conveyed with lyrical precision. This book is "a mystery that has become restful" (46)—how sweet and true and astonishing that is. What a privilege to be alive at the same time as Glück; her poetics have influenced me deeply.
"You changed me, you should remember me. / I remember I had gone out / to walk in the garden. As before into / the streets of the city, into / the bedroom of that first apartment. / And yes, I was alone; / how could I not be?" (Seizure, 45).
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