POETRY IN REVIEW: LOUISE GLÜCK

1 5 5 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R In the concluding words of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, the narrator envisions coming to a threshold, to a door: ‘‘If it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence, you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’’ For Beckett the banal phrase ‘‘I’ll go on’’ is resonant. It means ‘‘I’ll proceed’’ or, perhaps too strongly put, ‘‘I’ll persevere.’’ But it also means ‘‘I’ll go along’’ or ‘‘I’ll leave now,’’ and because it means the latter, it also means ‘‘I’ll pass on.’’ In French, Beckett’s other writing language, the comparable phrase for both ‘‘to go away’’ and ‘‘to die’’ is s’en aller. But of course we also use the phrase in English, as in ‘‘he’s just going on,’’ to mean ‘‘he will continue speaking.’’ Louise Glück, a poet who was so spare in her beginning that readers thought it made perfect sense when she revealed that she had been anorexic as a girl, has gone on now for twelve volumes, writing often precisely about ‘‘going on’’ in di√erent senses, but she has hardly ‘‘just gone on,’’ since far from boring Fa i t h f u l a n d V i r t u o u s N i g h t , b y L o u i s e G l ü c k ( Fa r r a r , S t r a u s a n d G i r o u x , 8 0 p p . , $ 2 3 ) 1 5 6 Y E N S E R Y anyone she has been as bemedaled and belaureled as anyone in her generation. When her Poems, 1962–2012 was published two years ago, readers might have been surprised by the heft of the book. It’s not that 634 pages is an improbable length for fifty years of work, but rather that much of the poet’s career was devoted to economy, if not downright austerity. Her early verse was so taut and charged that its words conjured ‘‘the hard, active buds of the dogwood’’ she noted on a walk. The poems rarely exceeded a page – though before long (in an early indication of her eagerness to develop) she began to link them into sequences – and her stanzas and lines were pruned and clipped. Her diction was spare, and it was abstract, perhaps partly because particulars proliferate, while her syntax was wiry and direct, her infrequent figures trim. One imagined that before she let a poem go, she began at the end and worked her way against the grain back up the page, omitting and condensing at every turn. The opening sentence of Firstborn, in a poem about a train trip, technically contains almost four brief lines, but it brakes to a full stop after only eight words: ‘‘Across from me the whole ride / hardly stirred.’’ The subsequent volumes begin thus: Even now this landscape is assembling. [‘‘All Hallows’’ in The House on Marshland] You see, they have no judgment. [‘‘The Drowned Children’’ in Descending Figure] It is not the moon, I tell you. [‘‘Mock Orange’’ in The Triumph of Achilles] Long ago, I was wounded. [‘‘Parodos’’ in Ararat] At the end of my su√ering there was a door. [‘‘The Wild Iris’’ in The Wild Iris] It could be Beckett’s door. Her one book of prose, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, comprises sixteen elegant and rebarbative mini-essays or lectures in 134 pages. The first opens with a dictum that accords with the lines just quoted: ‘‘The fundamental experience of the writer is P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 5 7 R helplessness.’’ The last, ‘‘On Impoverishment,’’ a valedictory address to her students, works sternly toward its blessing: ‘‘It is very strange to stand here, wishing you desolation.’’ She can...