Louis Gluck: Column on a Brave and Truthful Nobel Laureate | Books

At Stanford in 2008, Irish poet Evan Boland told me how much he appreciated Louis Glock’s work. She took some parts of her poetry off the shelf of her poetry fee and gave it to me.

That night I read the opening lines of a poem:

I’m sleeping so you can live
It’s easy.
Dreams themselves are nothing.
It’s a disease you control,
Nothing more.

It was called A Dream of Shock. I was amazed by the combination of his shredded, painful tone, which was deeply private and strangely ightened high and mythical.

In an essay on Emily Dickinson, Glückel wrote: “It’s hard to think of an organization that works, to invest in a standalone reader, without sacrificing any individual work.” T.S. Regarding Eliot’s poetry, Glück observes: “And I believe that among sensitive readers, there must be many who do not share the same interest in my voice.” And while writing about the poet George Open, Glück called him a “master of white space.” Restraint, disorder, nuisance ”.

It can all be said about his own work. Her poems are controlled and very charged, restrained but open, fearful and even afraid of aggression. Glück describes “using the power of imperfect people” to create a whole that does not lose its dynamic presence that remains imperfect: “I don’t like poems that seem too full, seals too tight; I don’t like to stick to certainty. “

They open up a whole space. The voices in his poems emerge from their rhythms temporarily and then bravely and sometimes intensely. Gluck knows what a tone is needed when he wants to be truthful. She has a knowledge, which is both reprehensible and competent, how little can be said to be true, and how much dark energy is released in an attempt to speak after that. In his poems, the tone itself is organized and highlighted. Her work is full of noise, often excitement and murmur, as if she were searching for the next difficult soul or soul shape.

If there is one poem by him that gives us an understanding of his great genius and the bravery of his voice, it is the opening poem of his collection The Wild Iris, which begins:

At the end of my suffering
There was a door.

I have heard her say that this image was with her for years before she could find a place for it. In the order of the book’s poems, Glock follows nature with a distilled act, a tone full of kindness and wonder, but also a sense of effort and effort. In all his poems, we find a picture of the world as a struggle between ordeal and wonder. There is always a realization that the poems themselves are the result of Glück’s struggle for his own imaginative words, which are precise, but also suggestive, in which the suffix also contains harsh words.

It is difficult to think of another living poet whose voice has so much electricity in it, whose rhythm is under such control, but whose work is also so open and immediate.