Before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature this year (much to her surprise), the American poet Louise Glück had already won the Bollingen Prize for her book Vita Nova, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, and the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris. Helen Vendler wrote in The New Republic that her poems had “the distinction of being neither ‘confessional’ nor ‘intellectual’ in the usual senses of those words”. Her work is thematically organised, peppered with classical allusions, and unabashedly honest. In her twelve collections and two chapbooks, her poems also vary widely in style and content.
Glück’s poetry is both simple to understand and accessible, yet emotionally evocative and endlessly complex. In the opening lines from her poem ‘Lullaby’, she writes:
My mother’s an expert in one thing:
sending people she loves into the other world.
The little ones, the babies – these
she rocks, whispering or singing quietly. I can’t say
what she did for my father;
whatever it was, I’m sure it was right.
Glück’s voice was shaped by bedtime stories narrated to her by her father, a Hungarian immigrant to the USA, who helped invent the X-Acto knife. The influence shows: her writing is as knife-sharp, incisive, and clean as a bone. Glück prizes austerity and economy of wordcasting. The experiences of the subjects of her poetry (like the mother in ‘Lullaby’) are archetypal, yet they are written in a way that makes them unique, the way we as individuals view our own experiences as unique, no matter how ubiquitous they may be. Though there is a rich register of emotion in her poetry, there is also a rejection of sentimentality, and an unflinching examination of wounds under the skin.
In Averno, another set of poems entirely based on mother-daughter relationships, Glück invites us, literally, to the underworld. Avernus is a lake in Naples, mythologised in Ancient Rome as the mouth of Hades. Entering these poems places us in the liminal space between life and afterlife, and Glück’s writing explores this eternal rift in the soul. She transforms the myth of Persephone—Demeter’s daughter, allegedly abducted by Hades. ‘The daughter is just meat’, Glück writes of Persephone, who is usually read as torn between mother and lover. In Averno, Persephone is given both interiority and agency.
Perhaps Glück’s greatest asset as a writer is her understanding of circumstance and human destiny. Her poems reflect a compassion for her subjects. They are also held up by a nuanced web of meaning that is left to the reader to seek out. Her initial reaction to winning the Nobel, as she stated in an interview with the New York Times, was of suspicion. Suspicion, indeed, is Glück’s single-word manifesto: through themes of motherhood, death, desire, and trauma, she pries open the veneer of what we call ‘life’ and compels us to confront just how tenuous it is.
Our mascot writes all ALMA Staff pieces. ORI is whimsical and unpredictable; we’ve tried being friends with him and failed.
