Review by New York Times Review
EVEN before the unknown versifier of Isaiah, poets probably looked at a lush meadow and saw a graveyard. Louise Glück's wary, pinch-mouthed poems have long represented the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse - starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from. Poets, being creatures of routine, tend to settle into a style sometime in their 30s and plow those acres as if they'd been cleared by their fathers' fathers' fathers. Read a poet's second or third book and you will see the style of his dotage. Poets restless in their forms, unwilling to take yesterday's truth as gospel, are as rare as a blue rose; and rarer still are poets like Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer. "A Village Life" is a subversive departure for a poet used to meaning more than she can say. All these years that Glück has been writing her stark, emaciated verse, there has been an inner short-story writer itching to break out. (The publicity optimistically refers to the new style as "novelistic"; but there is no novel here, only patches of long-windedness.) The lines are long, the poems sputtering on, sometimes for pages, until they finally run out of gas, as if they were the first drafts of a torpid afternoon. Even so, there's a faith in speech, as well as a generosity of instinct, apparent in these laggardly lines, though the reader may be forgiven for thinking that some charities are impositions. As in Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology," Glück uses the village as a convenient lens to examine the lives within, which counterpoint the memories of her life without. Unlike Masters, she writes without moralizing, though with the same steady knowledge that our destination is the grave ("To get born, your body makes a pact with death, / and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat"). Unfortunately, the quickest way to the mortuary is apparently marriage: Perhaps I'm not the only reader who finds Glück hilarious, in a ghoulish way - like a stand-up vampire. The tales that unfold piecemeal from this country town (what is gossip but a part of the whole?) bear the scars of everyday life - childhood fraught with unspoken secrets, adulthood always on the verge of adultery, lives of resentment and suppressed rage, lives missing passion or self-knowledge. The world of this village seems so repressed, you're surprised the inhabitants don't kill one another just to have something to do - or something to talk about. The unchanging fields stretch beyond, overseen by their animal familiars, the bat and the earthworm (both given poems in propria persona), creatures by nature blind and ravenous. The flourishing olive trees suggest that this site of municipal suffering lies somewhere in Italy or Greece, countries burdened with the myths of the ancient world. This is a fantasy village, of course, this village of Glück's. There are cars and movies and television, so it isn't medieval, however timeless the attitudes; but the world of cellphones, iPods and computers has passed it by. Indeed, it's not clear whether the poet has projected certain scenes from an American childhood onto this fictional screen (the poet's voice is particularly hard to distinguish from her inventions here). What she has created is an HO-gauge model of sterility and futility, a place stultified in its antique habits and the passage of despair from adult to child, a Kafkaesque landscape marked by the autumn burning of leaves, an annual holocaust. Here the dead seem almost living, and the living already half dead - "Nothing proves I'm alive. / There is only the rain, the rain is endless." Even the view, with all the passive and frozen beauty of a Japanese scroll, is too much to bear ("as though this beauty were gagging you so you couldn't breathe"). The poet has long resisted giving her interior world any richness of description - a poem may contain rain, sea, clouds, sheep, a mountain, yet you learn little beyond the naked nouns. When a simile comes along, it's as if she had declared a public holiday (I'd max out my credit card for a few adjectives). What she chooses to reveal of this static pastoral lies in the predations or evasions of her verbs: flood, escape, shudder, vanish, scuffle, prowl, stalk. This mimesis denied creates a terrible hunger in the reader - Glück's intensity is often a form of starvation. It's like watching a black-and-white movie; the landscape is drawn in chiaroscuro. For a poetic world to be this narrow, the poet's desires must be powerfully austere. The real world, in other words, is so overwhelming it must be edited. Every desire in Glück is cautious, every pleasure suspect. She's almost a feral poet, beadily watching her prey before making a devastating remark - her favorite form of greeting is the ambush. Yet such wariness betrays a terrible sensual longing, sustained despite inevitable disappointment. Even eating a tomato is antic with danger: Like human brains! After reading such lines, not only do you not want to eat bad tomatoes, you no longer want to eat good ones. Glück's world is as close to Darwinian savagery as any a poet has invented (her psyche red in tooth and claw), but it would be a mistake not to see how vulnerable she is beneath her brutal observations. A poem about a mother trying to tell her daughter the facts of life is full of mortifying embarrassment - mother gives daughter one of those insufferable books that make sex harder to follow than instructions for assembling a bicycle. The terrible need not to lie to herself ("Nothing remains of love," Glück says darkly, "only estrangement and hatred") forces the poet to rehearse the old tales to see where the disaster began. Glück is perhaps the most popular literary poet in America. She doesn't have the audience of Mary Oliver or Billy Collins, whose books rise to the top of the poetry best-seller list (even poets are surprised to learn there is one) and stay there, as if they had taken out a long-term lease. Glück is too private and cunning a poet ever to win too many friends - indeed, part of her cachet is that her poems are like secret messages for the initiated. Her early poems were all elbows and knees, Plathian with a rakish edge, full of wordplay and tight jazzy rhythms. Glück became a minimalist's minimalist, moody, anxious to her fingertips - a nail biter's nail biter. Since the early days of modernism, there has been an argument about how little a poem could contain before too many of the burdens of meaning passed from writer to reader. The one-word poems briefly the rage in the 1960s (one of the more famous was Aram Saroyan's "oxygen," just the element such a poem lacked) established that an ironic gesture needs no more than a single word to make its case - it's unfortunate that the argument proved so small and uninteresting. Yet Glück has forced a whole world into a snow globe, and her phrases have been especially rich in their betrayals. Returning after some decades to a less styptic mode of speech takes courage, or desperation - sometimes finding a new rhythm, however, is like finding a new life. It's good to see a poet old enough to draw Social Security making new contracts with the language. Unfortunately, Glück doesn't yet have control of these long measures - the lines are slack, the fictions drowsy and the moments of heightened attention like oases in a broad desert (the poems don't argue, they merely accumulate). Without the energies of her short lines and sharply drawn moods, she turns out to have an imagination almost as conventional as anyone else's. Glück is still a poet of sensibility more than sense, which means that the mortal pressure of her verse exceeds her ability to make memorable phrases. She offers the gratifications of what she calls, dryly, "normal shame and anxiety," even when the content remains slightly vacant. "A Village Life," though far from her most interesting or most characteristic book, is oddly personal in its distracted way, like an interminable stage whisper (there are odd echoes of M. Night Shyamalan's Hollywood dystopia of five years ago, "The Village"). Glück learned much from Plath about how to make a case of nerves central to poetry (both poets owe a shadowy debt to Eliot); but finally Plath is a poet for whom the world was too full, and Glück a poet for whom the world is not safe until absolutely empty. Glück remains our great poet of annihilation and disgust, our demigoddess of depression. At her discomforting best, she reminds me of no poet more than Rilke, who was also a case of nerves and who also lived close to the old myths. Though her comments about him have been hedged, of all the Americans now writing Glück is the closest to being his secret mythographer. Her silences fall at times like moral resistance, and the most striking lines of her chatter are as haunting as an elegy for herself. William Logan's most recent book of poetry is "Strange Flesh."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Always philosophical, occasionally haunted, poet Glück often entwines personal memories and experiences with gleanings from the myths of ancient Greece. In her eleventh collection, however, a work of organic coherence and symphonic intensity, she fully enters the archetypal realm to conjure a timeless sense of life as manifest in a Mediterranean village seen through the eyes of men and women young and old. A fountain is a central meeting place and a symbol of life. The earth is alive as plants change shape and color, bats wing about, the sky empties and fills, and the villagers spiral from contentment to sorrow, passion to detachment. The village is a prison, a theater, a sanctuary. Life is bountiful, death is dominant. Glück's rendering of the stages of human life, from animal innocence to the firing of the self to the slow banking down of age are breathtakingly exact and unsparing, yet gloriously mysterious. By writing of human consciousness as a force of nature like sunlight and wind, Glück articulates life's camouflaged wholeness and sublime intricacy.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize-winner Gluck's 11th collection is set in an unidentified rural hill town somewhere in the Mediterranean. Less narrative than it is impressionistic, the book takes its undulating shape from natural cycles-the obvious but nonetheless awesome impact of days and seasons changing. Gluck has shown herself to be an astute, heartbreaking and often funny observer of everyday violence. In poems like "At the River" and "Marriage," she tracks life's messy movement from innocence and curiosity through lust, loss, anger and resignation. However, the relationships she studies are as much to the land-with its single, looming mountain, worked fields and increasingly dried-up river-as between individuals. Gluck's achievement in this collection is to show, through the exigencies of the place she has chosen, how interpersonal relationships are formed, shaped and broken by the particular landscape in which they unfurl. Though the poems are intimate and deeply sympathetic, there remains the suggestion of a distance between Gluck and the village life she writes about. When she declaims, "No one really understands/ the savagery of this place," it feels as though she is speaking less about her chosen subjects than about herself. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
What makes a great poem? Voice, as former U.S. poet laureate Gluck said in Proofs & Theories, her 1994 essay collection; poems will not survive on content alone. The Wild Iris, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and established Gluck as a poet to be reckoned with, offers a telling example of the mesmerizing power of voice. Unfortunately, only a few of the poems in this 11th collection could be called mesmerizing. Written from the outside looking in, the poems concern love, courtship, sexual liaisons, birth, and death as experienced by ordinary inhabitants of a nameless village, as well as the earthworms, bats, dogs, and mice that co-inhabit the place. A first-person narrator holds the poems together and gives the collection its somewhat bleak focus. VERDICT Readers will be reminded of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, especially as the poet notes the underlying "savagery of this place,/ the way it kills people for no reason." But instead of presenting an insightful portrait brimming with irony Ø la Masters, Gluck's poetry seems more like a quick sketch. Recommended for those who read poetry extensively.-Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
