The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction (review)

“Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken,” begins Louise Glück’s “The Untrustworthy Speaker”; to a flower in the title poem of her poetic sequence The Wild Iris (1992) are given the words, “whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice”.¹ The voice of Glück’s poems arrests and engages, offering what Glück has said she seeks in poetry: “the sound of an authentic being,” an “immediacy, [a] volatility” that gives poems that achieve it “paradoxical durability.” Such authenticity is wholly distinct from “sincerity’s honest disclosure”: “Poems are autobiography,” she concedes, “but divested,” not just of “chronology” and “anecdote,” but of “personal conviction”; in the work the poet “strives to be free of the imprisoning self.”²

The first single-authored book on one of America’s most important contemporary poets (a collection of essays edited by Joanne Feit Diehl appeared in 2005), Daniel Morris’s study of Louise Glück commands attention. As the title indicates, its aims are nonetheless modest. Quoting generously, reading sympathetically, and providing pragmatic critical terms, Morris has written a useful introduction. Although the book does not proceed chronologically, the introduction offers a brief overview of the poet’s work, from the Plathian Firstborn (1968), through ten ambitiously evolving collections including the oracular Descending Figure (1980), the plainspoken Ararat (1990), and the myth-saturated Triumph of Achilles (1985), Meadowlands (1996), and most recently Averno (2006). Morris sees Glück as primarily autobiographical, investigating, analyzing, and revising the self. He compellingly highlights her revisions of myth, religion, literature, and her own work. Reading Glück as “postconfessional,” he rightly links her with both modernist and so-called confessional precursors. Consistently keeping the poems in the foreground, he carefully avoids claiming too wide an interpretive reach for his critical paradigms, some of which persuade more fully than others. The most central paradigm—autobiography—proves the most problematic, but also the most suggestive for future work. Readers will benefit from Morris’s thorough bibliography and generous citations of others’ articles and book chapters. And they will be served well by his inclusion of the poems, many entire.

Morris approaches Glück’s work through several related themes: “desire, hunger, trauma, survival, commentary, autobiography, nature, spiritual witnessing” (2). These “keywords” govern chapters in Part One. The first usefully introduces “desire” and “hunger,” emphasizing not just the link between anorexia and writing in the now familiar “Dedication to Hunger,” but more importantly the “spiritual hunger” (Glück’s phrase) driving her work (36). Although he invokes theoretical models, desire in Morris’s account is primarily a relatively straightforward narrative of longing: for the beloved, for recognition from others, for poetic achievement. The chapter on “commentary,” perhaps the most original, argues that Glück’s poetry practices a form of textual interpretation, or “creative commentary,” corresponding with the Jewish tradition of midrash: “a reading process, an interpretive activity, [and] a creative cast of mind” (61). “[A]s an interpretive practice rather than as an essential identity formation,” Judaism provides “a model of revision” (97). Sustained readings of poems that rewrite Biblical stories, including the haunting “Lamentations,” trace different revisionary strategies.

Reading Glück next as a “trauma artist” and poet of “witness,” Morris calls her untrustworthy speakers “paradoxically reliable witness[es] to trauma, precisely because unreliable” (102); the poems “produce authenticity” through “unreliable narration” (112). While those paradoxes persuade, more frequently the trauma theory feels at odds with the poetry. The next chapter, “Challenging Trauma Theory: Witnessing Divine Mystery,” is brief but suggestive, addressing poems engaged with the Christ story. Its argument—that they challenge, or modify, trauma theory—doesn’t speak to the poems’ resonance, to which Morris clearly responds; he might have further developed links with central themes discussed elsewhere: prayer, god as fiction, the conflict between spirit and flesh.

In Part Two, four chapters focus on individual volumes. The chapter on The House on Marshland (1975)’s revisions...