![]() ![]() There is often in her poems a hint of danger, the possibility of cancellation. She writes about aftermaths (as, to some extent, all poets do) but revisits childhood, her relationship with her mother, the death of her sister and parents, the end of her marriage and old age with bleak and revelatory precision. ![]() ![]() From the beginning, she has been concerned with endings, declaring recently in Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014): And she is a poet not of dashes but of full stops: she comes repeatedly to a halt to consider. But unlike Dickinson, Gluck’s approach is non-ecstatic: she is more undeceived than exalted, not an obvious believer in the sublime. Glück could not have written her poems had Emily Dickinson never existed (she confessed in her Nobel acceptance speech to having devoured Dickinson’s poetry in her teens). This month, Penguin is presiding over a grand introduction – or reintroduction – to her work, bringing out the collected poems (also including 2006’s Averno, a reimagining of Persephone’s story and one of her finest volumes). There is a bare-branched, midwinter feeling to her writing, a leaflessness that has its own beauty. To read her is to encounter stillness and slow time. Even though she had been garlanded with literary awards in the US and faithfully published by Carcanet in Britain, she is a poet who never seeks attention. W hen Louise Glück won the Nobel prize last year, she was, to many in the UK, an unknown quantity. ![]()
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