Faithful and Virtuous Night

July 21, 2014
Glück’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,” Glück 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 Glück 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!” Glück notes, “truth as I saw it/ was expressed as stillness.” Characteristically sure-footed, Glück speaks to our time in a voice that is onstage, but heard from the wings. Agent: Wylie Agency.

September 15, 2014

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

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September 1, 2014
Glck begins her new collection, following the magnificent retrospective, Poems 19622012, 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 Glck 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. Glck, 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, Glck embraces dichotomiesThe whole exchange seemed both deeply fraudulent / and profoundly truewhile gracefully posing provocative questions about the nexus between nature and art and the churning complexity of consciousness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)