Review by New York Times Review
"TOWARD HIS CRITICS," Louise Glück wrote in one of her best essays, "the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present." That may sound peculiar coming from Glück. It's tough to imagine that a poet as distinctive and restless as she is would trust much in her champions, much less her critics. What's more, she might seem an unlikely celebrant of the future. Few living poets have dwelt as successfully on the past. Often employing the idioms of depth psychology - the analytic koans, the mythic analogies - she tends to approach her narratives of familial and erotic love from this side of their endings, and with more than a touch of fatalism. But one reason Glück has proved so central to American poetry, for five decades now, lies in her remarkable talent for recapturing wonder. For all her disabused austerity, she remains a great poet of renewal. This is not a matter of optimism, or "recovery" in the conventional sense. Rather, for Glück and the speakers in her poems, mere survival appears a nearly incredible wonder. Take the ending to the title poem of "The Wild Iris," perhaps her best-known collection, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993: I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater. Even as time has pressed more insistently upon the poet, she's maintained this power of regeneration. Here's the ending of the title poem of "Vita Nova," from 1999: 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. But what happens when the messenger of death has delivered his message? How can time be given meaning when it seems mere duration, mere waiting for the end? How does a great poet of renewal respond when the future appears to be erasure itself? What makes Glück's latest collection, "Faithful and Virtuous Night," so powerful is the inventiveness with which the poet responds not only to her own mortality, but to the entirely new vantage on the world that her predicament affords. This book follows the widely acclaimed publication in 2012 of Glück's "Poems 1962-2012." Yet no one could accuse this poet of relaxing into the role of the senior laureate reproducing a signature style. Reading these poems, one feels that all the resources Glück has developed up until now have been brought to bear, and yet, even more impressively, that she has demanded of herself new and surprising methods. The very atmosphere of "Faithful and Virtuous Night" offers a departure. Much of the book takes place in an imaginary British countryside. The tone is a wintry clarity, with several of the poems rendered in spare prose paragraphs. The main speaker, at times a thin mask for the poet and at times a more highly developed fictional character, turns out to be an aging painter, who is also - we learn at the conclusion of the long title poem - a man. Such authorial shape-shifting may prevent the reader from trusting too much in the conventions of lyric autobiography: Despite portraying the solitary self, these poems are not Louise Glück's verse diaries. The figure of the painter also keys us into a central obsession: The fact that our lives end, even as life itself must go on, is not only an existential problem but also an artistic one. In a poem titled "Afterword" (appearing, ironically enough, near the very center of the book), the speaker explains: Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings now seem to me simply local symmetries, metonymic baubles within immense confusion - Chaos was what I saw. My brush froze - I could not paint it. How does the artist escape such a trap? How does Glück account for her vision of chaos, her suspicion that "fate" and "destiny" may be fictions, while remaining faithful to her desire to give meaning and shape to experience? One way lies in trusting uncertainty itself. "An Adventure," the second poem of the collection, begins with the poet describing a series of renunciations - of romantic love, of poetry, of "various other passions" that all must be set aside. The process at first seems strangely wonderful: But these farewells, I said, are the way of things. And once more I alluded to the vast territory opening to us with each valediction. And with that phrase I became a glorious knight riding into the setting sun, and my heart became the steed underneath me. Then the stanza breaks, and Glück follows with a humdinger of a tonal shift: I was, you will understand, entering the kingdom of death.... Still, "An Adventure" proves neither portentous nor blithely hopeful. As those seemingly contradictory tones balance together, the poet's uncertainty itself allows for greater depth and dimension. This is what makes "Faithful and Virtuous Night" so moving : Even as she admits that our forms of knowledge, the stories with which we understand the world and ourselves, are contingent and flawed, Glück suggests such stories are no less necessary or real. There's not a hint of easy consolation, much less any "triumph of the human spirit" in this book. But neither does the abiding darkness entail despair. At the end of the brief and magnificent prose poem "Theory of Memory," Glück imagines an augury, offered by a soothsayer: Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream. The high art and deep pleasure of "Faithful and Virtuous Night" derive from similar moments, moments of startling presence, when everyday facts turn magical, when disenchantment itself leads to renewed enchantment. It is a great good fortune to hold these poems in hand. PETER CAMPION'S most recent collection of poems is "El Dorado."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 28, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Glück begins her new collection, following the magnificent retrospective, Poems 1962-2012, with Parable, a keenly droll look at a metaphysical quandary central to the human condition, which sets the scope for the entire exquisitely musing volume. In the title poem, a transfixing symphony of night and its disconcerting illuminations, the speaker thinks, Perhaps the occupation of a very young child / is to observe and listen. This is also the work of a poet, which Glück performs in the persona of an orphaned boy who becomes an artist enthralled by the cycles of life, skeptical about our sense of purpose, and warily attentive to death. Glück, as masterful formally as she is descriptively, navigates gracefully through the dark, without and within, via a poetic form of echolocation, bursting out now and then into summer's bright carnival and the white blaze of snow. Witty, philosophical, and sensuous, Glück embraces dichotomies The whole exchange seemed both deeply fraudulent / and profoundly true while gracefully posing provocative questions about the nexus between nature and art and the churning complexity of consciousness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gluck's 12th collection, her first since Poems 1962-2012, is one where myth, long a primary concern of hers, takes a backseat to more quotidian affairs. "Mist covered the stage (my life)./ Characters came and went, costumes were changed,/ my brush hand moved side to side/ far from the canvas,/ side to side," Gluck writes, "I took a deep breath. And it came to me/ the person who drew that breath/ was not the person in my story." While readers familiar with Gluck will recognize her voice, here she is more conversational, more grounded in the materiality of human experience: "First divesting ourselves of worldly goods," the book begins, "we had then to discuss/ whither or where we might travel, with the second question being/ should we have a purpose." Whether through long poems or short prose bursts, she returns to stillness and night as the baselines for human experience, stages upon which the human drama unfolds. "I was aware of movement around me, my fellow beings/ driven by a mindless fetish for action-// How deeply I resisted this!" Gluck notes, "truth as I saw it/ was expressed as stillness." Characteristically sure-footed, Gluck speaks to our time in a voice that is onstage, but heard from the wings. Agent: Wylie Agency. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Old poets never die. They just write about "entering the kingdom of death," as Gluck, former winner of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, calls it. In the poet's latest collection, aging is a cerebral place where the poet remembers her childhood years and connects them to the present. The title poem is memoirlike, describing halcyon (and not so halcyon) days with an older brother and later with a younger sibling. Other pieces suggest that for the poet, adventures are in the past, including her experiences as a writer. The best poems here allude to the state of the soul-"How deep it goes, this soul,/ like a child in a department store,/ seeking its mother." Gluck's imagery is muted but remains strong. Her voice still has its incantatory rhythms and hypnotic effects, but gone is the vivid metaphor and bright crisp style of the poems (with their sense of overhearing the pronouncements of a Greek chorus) found in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris. VERDICT These language poems try to travel to the interior-both the poet's and the reader's-but meander and often seem to go nowhere slowly although with a certain gracefulness.-C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD (c) Copyright 2014. 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.
