POETRY IN REVIEW

1 7 1 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W W I L L A R D S P I E G E L M A N Whatever else a poem is – an extended argument, a story in verse, an experiment in metaphor, or an outpouring of melody, whether ‘‘the beauty of inflections/Or the beauty of innuendoes,’’ as Wallace Stevens put it – it is also, to begin with, just a bunch of sentences. Think of the sentence as the vehicle for both the poem’s ‘‘schemes’’ (its musical arrangements, in the vocabulary of John Hollander) and its ‘‘tropes’’ (its constitutive figures). In a career spanning more than four decades, Louise Glück has written some amazing sentences. They are, for the most part, utterly simple. When trying to determine what makes poems di≈cult, uncrackable , indecipherable, opaque, or just weird, one can point to a poet’s diction, his or her references, figures of speech, ideas, or syntax. Auden, Stevens, Amy Clampitt: they often make you run to the dictionary. Pound and Pope: they demand footnotes. Shakespeare and Keats: they require the explication de texte perfected by Helen Vendler. Shelley, Browning, A. R. Ammons: you had better A V i l l a g e L I f e : P o e m s , by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 80 pp., $23) 1 7 2 S P I E G E L M A N Y know something about Plato and science. Milton, Ashbery, Clampitt (again), Robert Duncan, Jorie Graham: you wonder how a sentence that began one way ended in another. Glück’s sentences work di√erently, deceptively. The di≈culty of, and therefore the pleasure derived from, her poems have deeper causes. A poet who cares for syntax is always a poet who loves grammar. This, rather than unusual diction, ravishing music, or startling figuration, is what stands out most about Glück. There is not a single word in any of her eleven books of poetry that a ninthgrader doesn’t know. She has no interest in abstruse ‘‘ideas’’ per se. She trots out the most modest of cultural references, mostly to well-known myths. If any poet can be said to have made a virtue of stripped-down simplicity, it is she. At the same time, each of Glück’s books has taken a slightly di√erent tack from the others, deploying di√erent rhetorical strategies and organizational principles . That she can sound both di√erent and unmistakably the same from volume to volume is a sign of her quiet authority, her earned mastery of craft, what the poet-critic Wayne Koestenbaum has called her ‘‘pursuit of the minimalist ecstatic.’’ Two things about A Village Life will immediately strike even a seasoned reader of Glück: its style and its subject. I don’t know which is more powerful, or more revealing. Consider style, by which I mean syntax. Whether or not her sentences are technically simple ones, rather than compound or complex, they all sound simple. This has something to do with their diction, but even more with their syntax. Subject-verb-object: that’s how Glück works, even when she relies on subordination. It is foursquare , straightforward, all-American writing. She has always disliked what she has called the confected ‘‘ingenuities’’ of art, preferring an austere, distilled cleanness that seems modest and unembellished but is actually, and surprisingly, rich. Even the titles in her new book conform to a monolithic, prefabricated pattern. (Many of her older ones did as well.) All are either naked nouns (‘‘Twilight,’’ ‘‘Tributaries,’’ ‘‘Noon,’’ ‘‘Sunrise,’’ ‘‘Abundance’’) or modified nouns (‘‘First Snow,’’ ‘‘A Warm Day,’’ ‘‘Burning Leaves’’). The titles sound like bland standard issue. Tangible, strippeddown , they suggest the poet’s desire or need to name things, the particular and the general, in order to gain a purchase on solid reality. P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 7 3 R The sentences – to which I shall keep returning in this review – are equally of a piece. To take some opening sentences at random: The sun...