POETRY IN REVIEW

1 5 8 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W A B I G A I L D E U T S C H For decades, Louise Glück has delivered stormy reports on both inner and outer weather. Over the course of the eleven books gathered in Poems, 1962–2012, marriages implode, conversations disintegrate , and belief ruptures; the word shatter appears often enough to lend her oeuvre a paradoxical unity. Free verse proves her ideal medium: without the constraints of meter or form, Glück’s stanzas themselves appear chipped, cracked – physical reflections of their cutting power. At twenty-four Glück published her debut volume, Firstborn (1968). Even at that early age, she wrote sharply about sharp matters. (Biographers will note that her father invented the XActo knife.) Like Adrienne Rich, Glück built her career as a freeverse poet on the bedrock of formal mastery: Spiked sun. The Hudson’s Whittled down by ice. P o e m s , 1 9 6 2 – 2 0 1 2 , by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 634 pp., $40.00) 1 5 9 R I hear the bone dice Of blown gravel clicking. Bonepale , the recent snow Fastens like fur to the river. Standstill. We were leaving to deliver Christmas presents when the tire blew Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared Down by a storm stood, limbs bared . . . I want you. [‘‘Early December in Croton-on-Hudson’’] This angular stanza cracks ‘‘bone-pale’’ at its hyphen. Even Glück’s sun is ‘‘spiked,’’ as sharp as the ‘‘bone dice’’ (an expression blown to Glück’s Hudson all the way from Melville’s tomb). Yet the ‘‘spiked sun’’ also suggests a dead sun, or even a dead son: the fatally pierced Jesus haunts this desolate Christmas poem, which describes the delivery of gifts but not of sinners. Glück’s spondees (‘‘dead valves,’’ ‘‘pines pared,’’ ‘‘limbs bared’’) create a Lowellian density that matches the ice-packed river and that nearly brings us to a ‘‘standstill’’ as we wade through the poem. Over the years that sti√ness would melt away as the poems adopted the flow of free verse. Yet anguish continued to anchor them:‘‘Thereisalwayssomethingtobemadeofpain,’’shewritesin The House on Marshland (1975), her second book. ‘‘Your mother knits.’’ Pain not only serves as material for Glück’s yarns; it sometimes provides its own consolations: Where would I be without my sorrow, sorrow of my beloved’s making, without some sign of him, this song of all gifts the most lasting? [‘‘Relic’’] These singsong lines exult in sorrow: if our lover left us no other gift than sadness at his absence, then at least we can take comfort in the ever-presence of loss. Glück’s is a well-rounded melancholy; she sees not only the pleasure of sadness but also the pain in promise. For her April 1 6 0 D E U T S C H Y seems even crueler than for Eliot, who despaired at the flourishing of lilacs: ‘‘It is spring! We are going to die!’’ she writes in a poem about April, and in ‘‘Easter Season’’: ‘‘The crocus spreads like cancer / This will be the death of me.’’ The grimness can feel overwhelming – if April seems lethal, we worry, what will happen in January? (What did happen in January?) Even in the April of her life – during her blossoming as a young poet – Glück wrote dramatic monologues from the perspective of the old. ‘‘I was also a hot property in those days,’’ she laments in Firstborn. Later in her career, Glück sometimes seems to communicate from beyond the grave: ‘‘I’ve seen both birth and death,’’ she writes in Ararat (1990), and in The Wild Iris (1992), ‘‘That which you call death / I remember.’’ In such poems, life leads forward to death, and death backward to life; time moves not like an arrow but like a pendulum. Glück hints that we need neither exult in springtime nor mourn in winter since one season implies the other. If her grief is great, it’s also magnificently understated: one...