A new Penguin collection of the American poet’s work brilliantly showcases the spare beauty of her writing
When Louise Glück won the Nobel prize last year, she was, to many in the UK, an unknown quantity. 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. To read her is to encounter stillness and slow time. There is a bare-branched, midwinter feeling to her writing, a leaflessness that has its own beauty. 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).
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). But unlike Dickinson, Gluck’s approach is non-ecstatic: she is more undeceived than exalted, not an obvious believer in the sublime. And she is a poet not of dashes but of full stops: she comes repeatedly to a halt to consider. From the beginning, she has been concerned with endings, declaring recently in Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014):
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