Louise Gluck Books

In the book, Meadowlands, Louise Gluck tries to appeal to all types of readers. Writing his poems in a relatively simple vocabulary makes readers believe that it is an easier book. The thing that has happened in the past has happened again in Gluck poems, they are not finished. Gluck gives the reader in a few of his poems the opportunity to imagine what goes on next. In some poems the reader must first remember the scenario from a poem before it to enjoy it. For example in the poem "Meadowland 2" was set up by the poem "Meadowlands I", the reader must first think of a situation. Reading this poem straight with nothing in mind is very simple and I think boring:

Meadowlands 2
Alissa isn't bringing back
Sticks for the house; the sticks
belong to the dog.

Understanding that the poem was a continuation of a previous one gives it so much more meaning and make it interesting and funny. To get the understanding of this poem you must read the book. The reason why I particularly like the book is because it has no set structure. Unlike some poets, Gluck doesn't have a set pattern or structure that he puts all of his poems under. This book was more like a novel than most books of poems. It is not hard to see that the plot was inspired by the The Odyssey. Two separate narratives connect the book. The over all plot is about a modern marriage. By incorporating the real plot with modern and contemporary, Gluck is successful in reminding the reader that the books theme of love, pain and loss, are subjects that have been with us since before there was even a written literature. Gluck is different in that everything you think poetry should be is pushed to the limits. She has breaks in sentences; there is no real meter most of the time. Word don't have to rhyme and is they do it is sporadic. There are two narrators and they are presented in a clear but unusual way.

I would recommend this book to readers because it is very different. It is a style of a book of poems that I personally have never read before. I think that if you want to try something new and different, Meadowlands is the book for you.

Meadowlands, by Louise Gluck speak for characters whose voice was not heard as much in the novel the Odyssey. The book has poems that seem to speak for three characters, Penelope Circe, and Telemachus. The book deals with many-life long experiences from family life to love life. Gluck uses characters from the Odyssey to tell her stories through her poems. Many of her poems deal with love and its good times and the bad times. The poems in Meadowlands are sincere and have almost the same theme. They all are about relationships and the hardships that come with them. A recurring theme that seems to be in her poems is being in an abusive relationship where both people aren't happy. Meadowland is a book that is easy to relate to because many people may have shared the same experiences as the characters in the book. The poems in the book seem to start off with a happy couple then as the reader reads on, he or she learns of problems that the characters encounter. Some of the many issues that can be read in this book are jealousy, infidelity and many common difficulties associated with relationships. All those are general issues that many people have to deal with when being in a relationship. Louise Gluck's book Meadowlands is entertaining and interesting.

Few poets would ever compare themselves to Homer, or even compare their work to his. Doing so would create an unbelievable amount of pressure on said poet: their poem(s) in question would have to be just as good as his work, and puritans would be very hard to convince.

Louise Glück adventures into this territory and comes out unscathed. Louise is no first timer to poetry collections, she knows what she's doing and it shows. Many poems in this book are about her and her husband, while others are about the characters in Homer's The Odyssey. Having these two different kinds of poems in the book at different times inflicts a great compare/contrast attitude to the reader. Not only do the inclusions of The Odyssey characters give an interesting comparison, it also elaborates on secondary characters in the book that Homer did not develop deeply. Characters like Telemachus, Odysseus' son, have their own poems with their own views on the situations going on.

Glück's writing style is somewhat simple. For people who don't normally read poetry, you usually will have to sit with two books when reading: the book, and a dictionary. However, the down-to-earth straightforward style in Meadowlands has it so that you can just sit comfortably with just the poem book itself, leaving the heavy dictionary out of the picture. Some will say that this brings the book down, that the fact that it's so simple takes away from the feeling of the book. This is most certainly not true. The way Glück describes the couple and how they interact with each other can be fairly shocking at times. One such poem, "Heart's Desire," has the two discussing a party idea. The woman says she's only going to invite people who can cook, and "all my old lovers."

Glück's book shows the truth of marriages, how they really are and how people start to really act toward one another when they've been together so long. This book of poems is worth the read for anyone interested in The Odyssey, marriages that are on the rocks, or anyone who can appreciate good, simple poetry.

Louise Glück's merger of the novel The Odyssey and her own life experiences in her marriage were brilliant. Instead of writing the poems through Odysseus's point of view she writes poems based on the point of views of the people around him: Penelope the wise and beautiful wife at home, Telemachus the timid and troubled son of Odysseus and Penelope, and Circe the enchantress who is said to turn men into "swine," are the three characters whose points of view are expressed in this poem. The subject of the book that intertwines Glück's marriage and the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope is the deterioration of marriages. Although in The Odyssey Penelope and Odysseus don't actually break up, Glück uses these mythological figures to question the foundation of marriages today. Glück shows that the deterioration of marriages in the past and those in the present are not dissimilar. Just as in The Odyssey Louise's marriage disintegrated because of neglect by the other spouse. Louise shows her neglect in the poem "The Wish" when she says "I wished for another poem." Just like Odysseus abandoning Penelope for his work Louise abandoned her marriage for her work. I think that Glück used her imagination to explain what she thought these characters were thinking at the time based on her own experiences. The point of view of the child caught in between the break up and one of the causes of the break up, the mistress and her utterance of the affair in the wife's ear. The relating of the modern marriage to Homer's book was beautifully written and expressed the underlying theme of the book very well and in some way people can really understand. Through Glück's use of dialogue between herself and her husband she shows' an openness. I love this book and I would recommend many people to buy it because it shows how the division of two people in a modern marriage isn't far from marriages in the past.

This is one of the best, if not the best, of Gluck's books so far (though I have not yet read Averno.) Gluck's understated sense of humor pervades the collection, which focuses on a contemporary couple's disintegrating relationship and the relationship between Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus. The sharp bite of anger, bitterness, and confusion infuse the most personal poems, but again, a turn of wit often lifts the poem by the end. Emotionally resonant and deceptively simple, this collection bears frequent re-reading. As a poet, I have studied the structure of the book as a classic example of entwined themed poems. My favorite poems are in the voice of Circe, who states at the end of one poem: "If I wanted only to hold you,/ I could hold you prisoner." And the poem "Midnight," with the lines: " is this the way the heart/ behaves when it grieves: it wants to be/ alone with the garbage?"

One of my favorite book of poems. Tender and tortuous. Had a chance to meet with the author and discuss it with him. He is as interesting as the book itself. Definitely a must read.

It's hard to sum up these poems. They're so evocative and fascinating, often transforming their meaning and intent from line to line.

In a way they are very much like the best noir films, constantly working at the edge of revelation and deception to create a narrative. The underlying themes of desire- much of it gay- and danger work beautifully with images of bullets, motorbikes, bodies and respite.

These are poems that you read when you want to tear your heart open and feel things. These poems kept me awake revisiting loves from my past and crying over the freshness of emotion that came over me. Reading these poems in like living reality in imaginary circumstances because you are there with Richard and you want to reach out and grab his hand and let him know that he is not alone. "Dirty Valentine" is a haunting recount of love that takes you over and never gives back what is taken:

You swallow my heart and flee,but I want it back now baby. I want it back."

These are the lines you hear in your head after reading this poem This is the heart of the poem and the heart of the book.
Another poem that stands out is "Saying Your Names," words whispered to a lover in the darkness after making love:

"Names called out across the water,
names I called you behind your back,
sour and delicious, secret and unrepeatable,
the names of flowers that open only once,
shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops,
or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep,"(33)

His command of imagery and form is unique in this book as well. As a poet, I am inspired by his example to write more poetry and to dig into my own life, find the poems that rest there and wake them up.

Richard Siken, Crush (Yale, 2005)

When I compile my list of the ten best reads of the year, I have no doubt whatsoever that Richard Siken's first book, Crush, will be on that list, possibly at the top. I could stare at the cover for hours-- a close-up of a mouth, and a hand, thumb wet with blood, or perhaps motor oil. It fits perfectly with the contents of the book, which are clingy, suffocating, obsessive, and uniformly brilliant. Louise Gluck writes in her introduction that "[f]or a book like this to work, it cannot deviate from obsession (lest its urgency, in being occasional, seem unconvincing)...". She is, of course, correct; how obsessive can you be if you are not constantly turning your obsession over in your mind or your hands? And Siken provides a picture of obsession that is hauntingly pure.

"...Your name like
a song I sing to myself, your name like a box
where I keep my love, your name like a nest
in the tree of love, your name like a boat
in the sea of love-- O now we're in the sea of love!
Your name like detergent in the washing machine.
Your name like two Xs like punched-in eyes,
like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter,
your name with two Xs to mark the spots,
to hold the place, to keep the treasure from
becoming ever lost. I'm saying your name
in the grocery store, I'm saying your name on
the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal
covered with frost, your name like a music that's
been transposed..."
("Saying Your Names")

There is something not right about this, and it's obvious from even a cursory read. In the hands of many (perhaps most) other poets, a passage like this would come off sappy-sweet. Siken makes it distressing, darkening it until finally the reader is trapped there in the pit with him, for no matter how dark this collection gets (and this is the tip of the iceberg), there is always that seductive, lilting quality to Siken's lines that never quite lets the reader go, even long after the back cover is shut.

This is one for the ages. *****

Siken's book is both over-hyped and over-dramatized. His poems are little more than language masturbations and like some regrettable one night stand leaves the reader feeling empty inside. I bought this book on recommendation from a friend who loves it --and indeed there are many who do--but his poetry strikes me as dangerously self-serving, with little to impart on the reader. I cannot for the life of me imagine Louise Gluck choosing this book - as someone who favors and employs what is "unspoken" in her work, Siken is an overwritten, screaming babe.

Gluck's work should be read fully. She is hard to browse through, not only because she writes her individual collections as novels, but because all eight books continue the story of her life, poems chorusing and coruscating. The surrealist yearnings of Firstborn, the development of wry rhetoric to hide real paing through Triumph of Achilles, the deadly precision of Ararat, all culminated in a ferociously ecstatic (in a biblical sense) book, Wild Iris. Since then, Gluck has been in new territory and taking a lot of flak for it. Vita Nova lacks the iron control usually associated with Gluck. She is trembling in this book, vulnerable. Her cracks beging to show. Indeed the myth is stitched clumsily to the life, because Gluck has had a go at depicting her favorite subject (herself) literally coming apart at the seams. Its a triumphant continuation of her work, and, as always, I am breathless to see what she does next. And next.

Louise Gluck practices poetry like few others in the language. She does not write single poems; rather, she constructs volumes, she forms arcs of narrative and progression from single poems into books. Vita Nova, for me, does not succeed either as a volume, nor as a collection of individual poems. The central organizing logic, once again myth, the love of Orpheus and Euridice, offers few new insights into the tediums and betrayal and insoluble dilemmas of love. It is as if Gluck is traveling in a groove she has worn well over the years, perhaps too well. The stitching of myth with her own life was done better, though still clumsily, in Meadowlands. This is not Ararat, nor is it The Wild Iris, nor Descending Figure, volumes that invoke ache. Still, there are some excellent poems in this volume, some heartbreaking lines, and lines that communicate with immediacy and grace and utter wryness ("I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. Then my heart was broken."). But there are also poems that drag, mired in their own metaphors. Uncompelling. This is a volume that perhaps her seasoned readers will have to learn to love, at least appreciate, like Meadowlands. For those who are not familiar with Gluck, be assured that even this outing, not her best, still outshines most poets publishing today. For a true introduction, beginning readers should start with Ararat or The Wild Iris. Vita Nova should be saved for a time when you love her so much, you'll be able to forgive her at her half-mast. In the fleet of her own work, this is no flagship.

Even though, I'm not american i must say that this the best poetry book i've read in 1999. It's a wonderful book

nothing more to say, flat out the best volume of the yea

As a poetry reader who starts his every day by reading poetry,this book was my favorite for the year of 1999.Ms. Gluck should get a Nobel Prize so that other parts of the world can enjoy her masterpiece collections.

Louise Glück's 2001 poetry collection The Seven Ages features the style readers have come to expect from her: a somewhat simple writing style, a confessional style, and a strong point of view. The collection opens with several poems dedicated to the travails of growing older. The regret of forgotten dreams and the realization of death dominate the first quarter of the collection and infuse throughout the collection.

However, Glück's obsession with growing older brings her back to childhood the topic of much of the rest of the collection. It is through her childhood memories that Glück recognizes the unmovable force of time. In "Radium," Glück writes:

"And then fall was gone, the year was gone.
We were changing, we were growing up. But
it wasn't something you decided to do;
it was something that happened, something
you couldn't control."

This glimpse into childhood and the loss of times gone by is something of which everyone can relate from young adults to senior citizens.

Permeating through the entirety of the collection is nature and the impact on our memories. In "Ripe Peach," Glück celebrates the joys of life through the simple enjoyment of a ripe piece of fruit. In "Copper Beech," Glück remembers her childhood through a single tree from her childhood home. In fact, the tree finds its way into a few other poems to resonate its importance.

The overarching themes of Glück's collection make it a nice read with no really jarring changes in theme. Glück experiments a little with style but nothing overly experimental.

I recently saw a review of Louise Glück's "The Seven Ages." With a kind of innocent wantonness, the reviewer dismissed the worthiness of Gluck's collective output, and flatly declared the book to be without idea, philosophy, pleasure.

In a perfect world, people would be shot for less, and organ procurement teams notified.

Glück strips. She prefers elemental language---hers is a hard-body and athletic poetry---but her sparsity never short-changes emotional impact, borealistic or far subtler. To wit, from "Youth;"

"My sister and I at two ends of the sofa,
reading (I suppose) English novels.
The television on; various schoolbooks open,
or places marked with sheets of lined paper.
Euclid, Pythagoras. As though we had looked into
the origin of thought and preferred novels."

Her subject matter, if not the whole of the world and us in it, frequently takes the form of love---real love, passionate love, the opiate kind come riding zephyrs, powerful enough to border hystericism, such is its biological power. This focus also includes at times the unhappy aftermath, such as is found in "The Balcony":

"It was a night like this, at the end of summer.

We had rented, I remember, a room with a balcony.
How many days and nights? Five, perhaps-no more.

Even when we weren't touching we were making love.
We stood on our little balcony in the summer night.
And off somewhere, the sounds of human life.

We were the soon to be anointed monarchs,
well disposed to our subjects. Just beneath us,
sounds of a radio playing, an aria we didn't in those years know.

Someone dying of love. Someone from whom time had taken
the only happiness, who was alone now,
impoverished, without beauty.

The rapturous notes of an unendurable grief, of isolation and terror,
the nearly impossible to sustain slow phrases of the ascending figures-
they drifted out over the dark water
like an ecstasy.

Such a small mistake. And many years later,
the only thing left of that night, of the hours in that room."

We get the whole of it: the event experienced, the event witnessed, the event's ramifications as prophecy, and finally the unretainable ecstasy and brutal wisdom of the high-country moment, returned to everyday living, so far as possible. Contrary to unpopular opinion, Glück's latest work makes the most of idea and philosophy and pleasure, embodied in its paced and quiet understatement, signifying its origins in the truly genuine. The Seven Ages rings with the sharp strike of the authentic, rarely sinking into the echoes of sentimentality.

Really, is another round of balloting necessary to induct Glück into a mythical poetry hall of fame? This one goes on the first ballot.

Read the book. More ripe delights await.

I know Gluck has won all kinds of awards and honors, but to be honest, I found this collection to be mediocre (though her poem "Youth" is pretty good). It isn't bad, but it isn't something that I'd recommend anyone run out and buy.

Salient in this book is Louise Gluck's absolute brilliant mastery of every aspect of poetry. She said somewhere that this was her weirdest book yet. It's not among the most experimental poetry published today; it's unique great Louise Gluck. Every word in every poem feels like a monumental perfection.

I hope this review has been helpful to you.

Louise Gluck has quietly become one of our greatest poets, building an impressive, meticulous body of work since the mid-1970s. The fact that she's also a winner of just about every major poetry award, pales in comparison to the naked searching, the brave confrontations, and the hard-won, deeply resonant wisdom her poems uncover. Deceptively simple, Gluck's diamond-cut lines encompass a vocabulary refined to the simplest -- purest -- of objects and emotions, that when repeated gain a kind of elusive, opaque mystery. Whether the subject is herself, her older sister, her lovers, time, memory, desire, or death, the cumulative effect is nearly catechismal -- and, indeed, reading Gluck is like going to church.

The first four books undoubtedly comes from her relatively early period.However,they are all works of a born-poetess.Original,gripping,challenging and elegant.Very elegant...

Self-expression is perhaps the only cure for the great social gag that once bound women's creativity. Female poets are essentially empowering themselves through language; society no longer expects them to be simply silent and useful. In particular, Louise Gluck deals with many of the issues facing the contemporary woman as an individual. Her work addresses the feminine identity as it relates to independence and personal fulfillment. The stark simplicity of her language underscores the depth and complexity of her subjects with a sense of tight control. Her writing is constantly evolving; the poems as a body of work are as meaningful when taken together as each is standing alone. Beginning with tentative exploration in her early work -marked by themes of loss and emptiness - Gluck's poetry moves towards a denouement of fierce self-actualization, just as in modern culture women make their way towards triumphant fulfillment. In this collection of her first four books, one may see the movement of a voice from submissive flesh forward into exclamatory liberation.

I bought this book for my intermediate poetry class, and although I have not yet finished reading through all of it, I have placed it high on my list of favorites. Each of Gluck's poems is something to be savored - you can feel the words on your tongue, and the pictures she provides are so real that you almost wish her memories and images were your own. Only Gluck can describe something as heart-wrenching as a fickle lover as waspishly and deliciously as she does, ending that particular poem with the words "You pimp." Nor can the reader ignore her own delicate, luminous poem "The Nativity", which expresses her own thoughts on the birth of Christ. The majority of Gluck's poetry is short and the lines simple; however, the images triggered by the words and what she means to convey is of a far greater volume. As you read through this fantastic collection, you'll find that many of Gluck's images, ideas, glories and frustrations are those of every person. The way she expresses herself leaves you bowed over at each poem's end, and you always want to read ahead to see what else she will present you with. These poems are Gluck's gift to the world, and the poetry unfolds before the reader as serenly as a flower unfolds to the sun. So check it out, you might really enjoy and be uplifted by what you read!

Take note: this is not actually the first four books of poems, but the first four books of poetry BY LOUISE GLUCK. It's a finicky distinction, but an important one when you think about it.

This volume collects Louise Gluck's first four books: Firstborn (1968), The House on Marshland (1975), Descending Figure (1980), and The Triumph of Achilles (1985).

If you're not familiar with Gluck, you're in for a wild ride. Her poems stare darkness in the face. They're unflinching. Consider, for example, the opening lines of "The Drowned Children," the opening poem from Descending Figure:

"You see, they have no judgment. / So it is natural that they should drown, / first the ice taking them in / and then, all winter, their wool scarves / floating behind them as they sink / until at last they are quiet. / And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms."

The most remarkable debut collection I think I've ever read. Jay Hopler explores a vivid, plangent emotional terrain, wrestling out the difficulties of faith and love and longing with an elegance that re-imagines the expressive capacity of language. A well-deserved award-winner, a major talent.

He makes up new words when the old ones just aren't hitting the mark, such as his use of 'lizarding,' in the line "The grass was lizarding."

His idea of a garden is different than the traditional Marvell garden of poesy, for he's from Florida and the airs and breezes of the Caribbean are never far away. People there have different ideas of what to do with their leisure. In another poem he rebukes Wallace Stevens for writing poems about Florida based on only casual, nearly imaginary visits only. Lately there's been a lot of questioning Stevens, but rarely on grounds so amusing; not only amusing but absolutely challengeworthy. Those of us who think of Key West because we read a poem by Wallace Stevens have things absolutely wrong, and Hopler is a good corrective, for he makes Florida seem dreary, mother-ridden and squashed with overdetermination, more like a spiritually impassable kingdom of Middle Earth than Steven's exotic Martin Denny stereosphere of birds calling, rain splashing, tiki worshipping.

Rhythm of a very different sort haunts his lines; from repetition, the simplest of childs' tools, he builds the kind of music Harry Partch might have envied. Bukowski too: "There is a black fly drowning in that glass of beer./ There is a black fly drowning in that glass of beer." Not by beer alone but through simple loneliness and also, the mistakes of FEMA, do we drown like black flies. "The man with the beer is a fisherman,/ Small and gigantic/ / in his white rubber boots." Cunningly an allegory of race relations, the black and the white, is built up from a few small simple and sensual details, largely color and texture. Hopler takes on big themes, but delivers in small strokes, like a master barber giving you the shave of your life. He speaks of the light "one finds in baby pictures" and he nails it as "old/ and pale and hurt" thus closing the circle on an entire misspent life. As he says, the big things such as the death of one's father jolt one to life, but it's the small things from which we derive our misery. An angel beats and beats each of us until we learn to love the pain.

Once again Louise Gluck has pulled forth another winner from a long supply of winners.

I very much enjoyed this collection. The voice is intimate, compelling, authentic, feels honest, curious, and contemplative. I got the sense of isolation and doubt but the speaker is also sensitive, funny, and inquisitive, so the voice rarely drifts into complete nihilism. There are also moments of humor and self-mockery. I wouldn't say it's without any pretension, but those moments are usually buffered by humility or self-contempt. He uses repetition in fresh ways and it becomes a formal device but never monotonous--not only repeating lines and phrases, but images are repeated, symbols, landscapes. It makes for a nice feeling of progression in the book. The poems take risks and sometimes they succeed as wildly and vividly as Lowell in his most eccentric moments, for example in the poem "The Frustrated Angel." Other times (for me) it felt too much like a puzzle and not poetry, for example "Firecracker Catalogue," --although that may be more reflective of my own taste than of his talent, which is obvious. But even with the few poems that were not my cup of tea, I still thought this collection was potent and enjoyable. I would recommend it.

Louise Glück explores the complex relationship between God, humans, and the natural world with startling emotional depth in The Wild Iris, her sixth collection. Far from the strained and occasionally awkward lines and language of her previous books, these poems strive for and usually master an elegant lyricism in the imagined voices of wildflowers; of God manifest in wind, light, and changing seasons; and of a woman who struggles to find evidence of God while laboring in a garden in a cold climate. In poems most often titled "Matins" and "Vespers," the human voice expresses fear, frustration, and love, while "checking / each clump for the symbolic / leaf" in the garden and entertaining the apprehension that God, the addressed "you" of these poems, "exist[s] / exclusively in warmer climates...." Plants, most often wildflowers, counter these prayers, presenting a view more eternal for the accelerated brevity of their lives. Glück's gift in these poems is a capacity for lyric eruption coupled with emotional restraint. The voices are passionate but never hysterical; plants and God chide humans, as in the poem above, for their apparently willful ignorance, but the criticism never reads as self-pity. These poems grapple honestly and successfully with questions of ultimate reality, not sheering away from critical self-assessment nor veering into a merely postured piety. They sing and praise and renew with successive readings.

The poetry we most love is the poetry we want to remember.
Reading here the title poem 'Wild Iris ' and another poem of the collection 'Red Poppy' I try to understand and feel if these lines will be read through once, or will call me back to them again.
I don't know.
They seem clear and strong in feeling. But they also seem abstract and distant.
They tell of a mind, a soul, a consciousness and even one which is shattered but I am not sure that their clear presentation will truly break the icy- sea within me.
These lines are lines of true poetry, but are they poetry enough to bring me back to them again and again?

I read this book for a university intro to poetry class. I had never read much real poetry before this class, so I had no choice but to approach this book with the beginner's mind. I must say that out of all of the great poetry we read in class, this book had my favorite selections in it. It inspired wonderful conversation about the idea of God, the capacity for nature to teach us new things, and the way that many humans don't seem to understand the world that they live in. There is no fixed voice here, at times the persona is God observing his creation, or it is the mind of a flower or a plant and at other times it is a despairing, confused and frustrated human. It is not always clear which voice each poem is written in, as God and human voices both sound like the plant voice sometimes and vice versa. This makes the plant voice something like the middle ground where God and the humans could communicate if only they knew how. All in all the balance of the three different styles of poetry blend together into a cohesive whole that really should be read as one related theme. Within all of that, there are images in this book that I think will either inspire or haunt you, or both. This is what I had imagined great poetry to be. This book defies the cliches about what nature poetry should be like and establishes a vivid and beautiful alternative world that is actually right before our eyes.

When I read Gluck's La Vita Nuova, I felt her poems good enough, but she did use the title Danta used. A title of her own would have been nice. But under the titles of Matins and Vespers, these are not prayers nor indications of holy devotion, but cold, cruel, and defensive outbursts. I find no point in these works. Her lines, "Not you, you idiot" and "I've heard you long enough. I can speak to you any way I want" do not spark my
interest. I was expecting these poems to scent out a religious hue, but I felt thistles and ivy and I cannot read this one. I'm going to give the copy I have away or discard it.

If I love Louise Glück, I adore *The Wild Iris*. There is not a single poem in this book that does not move me, speak to me, elicit some sort of positive response. I've loved Glück for quite awhile, and I came back to her recently in an attempt to recover from the events of a particularly devastating week. I sought new life in *Vita Nova* and found merely a hint of what *The Wild Iris* gave me today. I read this book quite awhile ago, and my second coming to it now revitalized me, left me feeling fresh and new and able to move on with my life. Thanks, Ms. Glück.

The book is a poetic sequence, epitomizes the idea of a sequence, in fact. That is, this is not a novel-in-verse, like the stupendous, magnificent, unbelievable *Autobiography of Red* by Anne Carson. There is no real plot, no real characters, no real setting. (I emphasize the adjective 'real,' because there is a plot and a setting and there are characters, but not in the traditional sense.) Rather, the poems speak to each other, they converse. Literally, as the book takes the form of two parallel discourses: 1) between a female gardener and God and 2) between plants and the female gardener or, more generally, humanity. It is no mistake that the book abounds with flowers and gardens and God: the creation myth of Adam and Eve in the garden acts a sort of driving force behind the entire book, although the Paradise lost is not necessarily a physical location or even a proximity to any one particular deity. The plot, as far as there is a plot, chronicles disillusionment, frustration, despair, and yes, hope. Most interestingly, every single one of the characters -- the flowers, the gardener, and God itself -- feel the emotions I've listed, and this anthropomorphizing of everything is yet another thread that weaves its way through the poems, connecting them and braiding them into the Pulitzer-prize winning sequence that they are.

The book, however, is more than the sum of its parts: each poem, individually, is its own work of art, and if the poetry were subordinated to the book, most of Glück's genius would be lost. The tone of the poems is unique: distant yet not detached, chilled yet not cold. Critics have claimed that Glück is neither an intellectual poet (à la Eliot) or a Confessional poet (à la Plath) but somewhere in between, and I'd have to agree. Her poems lack the in-the-moment emotional tantrums of things like "Lady Lazarus" or "Daddy," but they are not the universalized ice sculptures of *The Waste-land*. They are not so easily understood (at least superficially) as a Robert Lowell poem -- specifically with *The Wild Iris*, for instance, a bit of background on some of the flowers that speak is required to unlock the poems -- and yet they are not as inscrutable as something Stevens or Eliot wrote earlier in the century. Many of the poems have the characteristic irony with which Glück captured my heart long ago, an almost bitter and yet still amused tinge of sarcasm that makes me crack a smile despite the usually negative thoughts it conveys. Although she writes in unrhymed free verse, Glück is a master of the line, and this book has some of the most powerful single lines I have read in contemporary poetry: "in the raw wind of the new world"; "of enduring? Blaze of the red cheek, glory"; "this one summer we have entered eternity."

An amazing, life-changing book that answers the age-old adage "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" with a resounding, polyphonic YES.

The author of the book entitled Proofs & Theories is an excellent poet; her best poems are simple, clear, and direct. The Wild Iris is a masterpiece. But she is no prose writer. The essays in Proofs & Theories are filled with high-falutin' phrases and convuluted thoughts. Her syntax is confusing, to say the least. I bought this book thinking it would be great, but was very disappointed in it. I read no insights into the craft of writing poetry; I simply ended up with a headache. Don't waste your money on this book. Whomever told this woman that she could write prose was wrong. Her publisher should have taken a second look. I'd like to have my money back.

Louise Gluck is a fantastic unique thinker & these essays on poetry are always luminously brilliant. Her thoughts on poetry are great to read for anyone with serious interest in poetry & the experience of being a writer.

Louise Gluck is a master poet, & it's great to be able to read such a straightforward explanation of her thoughts on some of the art.

Taken in sum, Proofs & Theories serves as a place to begin assessing the shortfalls and liabilities of contemporary poetry. She explores such pernicious problems as the emphasis on "sincerity" as opposed to authenticity, the valorizing of obsession as "courage" in the critical lexicon, the promulgation of the subjective, and, as she writes in "Invitation and Exclusion," "the proprietary obsessiveness of much contemporary poetry which stakes out territorial claims based on personal history: my father, my pain, my persistent memory." Of these, the notion of "sincerity," of telling the truth--or at least seeming to--perhaps most pervades discussion of contemporary poetry; one strives to affect a sincere tone, to modulate one's voice such that the sincerity cannot be called into question. In "Against Sincerity," Glück notes the "gap between truth and actuality" and argues, "The artist's task...involves the transformation of the actual to the true." And, further, that "the ability to achieve such transformations...depends on conscious willingness to distinguish truth from honesty or sincerity." Equally "unnerv[ing]" is "the thought that authenticity, in the poem, is not produced by sincerity." Here, she posits a careful distinction; that which leaves the after-taste of authenticity--that which strikes us as credible, reliable, as true--may not be voiced in the saccharine tones of excessive sincerity.

"The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness," declares Louise Glück in the opening sentence of the first essay in _Proofs & Theories_. Although the type of helplessness Glück proceeds to describe differs from the sense of weakness with which a prose writer might attempt to review a book of poetry, the words nonetheless create a bridge between the poet-essayist and her reader. They ease the tension, the anxiety. The education begins.

Glück's essays remind the prose writer that all "reviews" may share certain features. Simple titles that target the subject ("On T.S. Eliot; "On Stanley Kunitz") work well; so, too, may titles that promise treatment of an elusive yet alluring theme: ("The Forbidden"; "Invitation and Exclusion"). On the whole, _Proofs & Theories_ also supports the notion that a review need not be long. Glück notes that most of her poet-contemporaries "are interested in length: they want to write long lines, long stanzas, long poems"; one might add that a number of literary reviewers are interested in writing long reviews, and such pieces are not always necessary. Finally, the essays convey a general impression that the _substance_ of a piece of literature is equally important (if not more so) than its _style_.

This last point is crucial for a prose writer approaching the task of reviewing poetry. Louise Glück's essays reveal preoccupations shared by prose writers--by this prose writer, anyway. Themes. Tone. Voice. It's perfectly all right, _Proofs & Theories_ tells the prose writer, to discuss poetry in these terms. One need not try to dazzle at first meeting with "metonymy" and "synecdoche," with "blank verse" and "internal rhyme." So don't be scared off.

It would, therefore, be acceptable to write an essay titled "On Louise Glück." To choose a theme from _Meadowlands_ or another of Glück's own works, to write about. Or to focus on the poet's voice in selected poems from one of her collections.

It might even be permissible to bring one's own experience of reading into the review. Thus Glück might learn of the moments when _she_ affected a reader, perhaps not to the extent that her own "encounter with [Wallace] Stevens was shattering." But she would see that her poet's presence as "human voice...a companion spirit" made a difference, in the moment of reading, and beyond.

And she would realize, if she doesn't already, that _Proofs & Theories_ provides an excellent education for anyone--prose writer or poet--seeking lessons into the craft of literary reviewing.

There's something exciting and difficult to put one's finger on in here -- allusive. It's poetry of imagery and fluidity. Its not poetry of moral instruction, self-expression, or the technical view -- poetry as literary exercise -- though it embraces all of those elements. What makes it a great book is its exploration of a such an original world -- but as all great poets and poetry, still sounds as familiar as the wind.

Streckfus' first book is a marvel: a poetry collection that evidences new life for the narrative poem, for the incorporation of fairy tale, myth and history in mysterious and moving ways.

Some pretty lines, but the fog never clears to reveal any depth, meaning, or technical proficiency.