The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 March 2016
by Louise Glück
It isn't easy to specify what it is about poetry that makes it often so much better than prose at evoking the human experience. Maybe it is just the really good poetry that works so well. In this small collection of spare verse, Louise Glück brilliantly evokes subtle and powerful experiences of life, love, aging and death. These poems, and flash prose pieces, are quiet, deceptively brief excursions into some of the deepest truths about getting on in life. Through Glück's work, we venture into feelings of love and loss, regret and grief, hope and the quiet fear of losing hope. Many of these pieces seem to reflect upon some personal experiences with memory and loss, so that the reader feels he or she is getting to know the poet. But that doesn't need to be the case. The reader will also connect with her or his own memories. The evocation of feeling and experience rises like a wave in the longer pieces. Some crest with more success than others, but there are no false notes here, no contrivances. There is a purity and clarity of thought in these poems that made this reader marvel at the grace and ease with which Glück stirred the heart.
(For this collection, Glück was awarded the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry.)
(Glück was also awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature.)