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Loading... First Four Books Of Poemsby Louise Glück
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Louise Gluck is my favorite poet, but these first four books are not her best. However, they give insight into how she has developed her style and themes and for that, they are worth reading. ( ) This book containing Gluck's first 4 collections of poems can be a little spotty at times. I found at least over the first 3 of these works--Firstborn, The House on Marshland and Descending Figure--her work to be a little spotty. At her best her work tends to be dry, objective and penetrating--almost surgical in technique to gain an objective. Of those mentioned above I would often find several that I liked quite a lot but also quite a few that I felt more indifferent about. A lot of those works seem to focus on relationships and relationships that have gone bad. In any case I was wondering whether I wanted to bother with the final collection 'The triumph of Achilles' and I am finally glad that I did as at least IMO it was by far the best of the four--the most focused in intent. There is very little fodder here--there is substance and clarity to practically every poem--Triumph of Achilles is an excellent collection. no reviews | add a review
Louise Gluck says in one of her essays that every end of a book is for her a "conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off" in which she discerns the themes, habits, and preoccupations of the previous volume to define the tasks of the next. The First Four Books of Poems shows this poet in the conscious evolution she describes, marking time in changes. Readers will hear specifics of sequence: where the ferocious tension of her first book, Firstborn, moves towards the more finely-spun lyricism of her second, The House on Marshland. They will also discover how the charged nouns of that book acquire more intimate weight to become the icons in her third, Descending Figure, and then rise to an archetypal mythic scale in The Triumph of Achilles. These poems are as various as the force of Gluck's intelligence is constant. In another essay, she cautions, "the deft skirting of despair is a life lived on the surface, intimidated by depth, a life that refuses to be used by time, which it tries instead to dominate or evade." The First Four Books of Poems attests to how truly Gluck has tested and proven the validity of her own warning. The fierce, austerely beautiful voice that has become Gluck's trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Always she is moving in and around the achingly real, writing poems adamant in their accuracy and depth. Their progression is proof of her commitment to change; with her first four books of poetry collected in a single volume, Louise Gluck shows herself happily "used by time." No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.54Literature English (North America) American poetry 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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