Glück, Louise
Entry updated 16 October 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1943-2023) US academic, poet and author, active from the early 1960s. Her poetry, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020, has long been recognized for its capacity to plumb rich depths in language seemingly stripped of conventional "poetic" device. But chthonic analogues constantly well up through exposed cracks and illuminations, in works like Ararat (coll 1990 chap) or Averno (coll 2006 chap), though most strongly in Meadowlands (coll of linked poems 1996 chap), where a contemporary narrative of marital loss is enstoried through extended parallels with Homer's Odyssey, a doubling that is manifest, but not commented upon through metaphor: not even in the poem "Nostos",incorporated here (see Mysterious Stranger): "We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory."
A similar unspoken deadpan wit governs the structure of Glück's novella, Marigold and Rose (2022 chap), where the eponymous one-year-old twins "look at the world once", but whose deeply linguistic articulacy, if viewed as an undistorting capture of inchoate Perceptions, might seem frivolous. Seen however through the literalizing lens of Fantastika, Rose and Marigold's dialogue does model some naked reception of the world before human Memory embarks upon the tragedy of retelling. That their superhuman precocity Parodies generic Tales of Origin of the typical Superhero goes without saying, and is unsaid. [JC]
Louise Elisabeth Glück
born New York: 22 April 1943
died Cambridge, Massachusetts: 13 October 2023
works (highly selected)
- Marigold and Rose: A Fiction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) [chap: hb/Gretchen Achilles]
collections and stories
- Ararat (New York: The Ecco Press, 1990) [coll: chap: hb/Michaela Sullivan from Christa Näber]
- Meadowlands (New York: The Ecco Press, 1996) [coll of linked poems: chap: hb/Michael Ian Kaye from Jennifer Bartlett, "Old House Lane #32"]
- Averno (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) [coll: chap: hb/Lisa Halliday]
links
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