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His poems sometimes seem deceptively clear and simple, but his work has enormous range. American Louise Glück likes to build on opposites, build bridges between ancient and present, and speak directly to readers.
Herbal beauty – that’s the essence of Louise Glück’s poetry.
Louise Glück may still be little known in the German-speaking world; But the poet and essayist, born in New York in 1943, has now presented with her a now twelve-volume work of poetry that stands out clearly from the fruitful abundance of contemporary American poetry, thanks to its thematic breadth and human depth.
The newly crowned Nobel laureate’s professional career has been entirely focused on poetry from the beginning. Her parents introduced her into the canon of Greek mythology at an early age; After studying at Columbia University with Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz, she started her own teaching position in 1971, which has accompanied her work to this day. The Nobel Prize is just the culmination of the many honors, including the title of Poet Laureate of the United States, that she has received.
Descent into the realm of the dead
So far only two of its volumes have been translated into German by Ulrike Draesner. Both are currently out of print, but Luchterhand-Verlag plans to reissue them as soon as possible. Since they are exemplary of the poet’s work, these works need to be examined more closely here.
“Averno”, published in original in 2006, reads like a summary of all those subjects in which happiness was important from the beginning of his writing. The landmark of the poems is the myth of the theft of Persephone by Hades. The god of the dead, forced to return the young woman, manages to tie her, at least partially, to the kingdom of the shadows by means of a trick: she has to spend a third of the year with her husband in the underworld. “One drifts between earth and death / which ultimately / seem strangely alike,” says one of the poems.
The last poem in the volume outlines a different version of the myth in which Persephone no longer wants to return to the upper world out of hatred and disgust for her mother Demeter. Instead, he reflects on “the profound violence of the earth” and asks the crucial question: “How can I bear the earth?”
The volume bears the title of Lago d’Averno, a small crater lake in Campania. It is located in the so-called Flegrean Fields, an area west of Vesuvius with high volcanic activity; Due to its isolation and inhospitable nature, the lake was considered a hotspot to the underworld from ancient times to the Middle Ages. It is a place of permeability between the world of the dead and that of the living, and where better to shed light on the various aspects of the human condition?
Robust and vulnerable
However, luck moves the darkness of the stage setting into the psychological realms. By playing through ancient myth according to modern psychological patterns, the unalterable and immutable conditions of human permanence on earth, and above all more concrete: feminine, come to light. Rather elemental and archaic, the fall and winter landscapes represent farewell, death, and perhaps the expectation of a new beginning. But in the face of all expectations there are doubts and despair. All life is waiting for the right moment. / Then the favorable moment turns out / to be a great opportunity “.
The references to the ancient myth are so extensive that there are several contemporary interpretations. This same strategy gives individual motifs a credibility that gives even somewhat worn metaphors like light, earth, and shadow a modern justification.
It is about farewell and return, body and soul, fatal mother-daughter bonds, fears of the future and memories, beauty, nature, the possibilities and impossibilities of love. Or put another way: How can you bear coldness, ugliness and impermanence? How can you live after seeing hell? Louise Glück presents these questions in a simple language, clear, direct, loaded with lyrics, without pathos, sometimes too painfully subjective, but this is precisely where she shows the strength of her poems: that they are robust and vulnerable at the same time.
When nature speaks
Again and again happiness falls on the well-known poetic moles that nature, often symbolically, represents a mirror for the human soul. However, much less frequently it happens that nature itself turns directly to humans to inform them of its own well-being. Those moments can be found in the poetry volume published in 1992, which Glück unpretentiously calls “Wilde Iris.”
Following the course of the year, let animate and inanimate nature have a say. The most varied flowers, the spring snow, the waning wind, the sunset, but also a door threshold and phenomena such as the harvest are related to people; They describe their own destiny and at the same time express what a person thinks and feels, but perhaps they do not always dare to say it so clearly.
Human existence is, on the one hand, participation in nature, but on the other, it is also something completely different, separate. In this sense, opposites lay the foundation for the entire volume of poetry, for example, the geometric concept of circle versus line, the teleological idea of infinity and finitude, the psychological idea of diversity and individuality. For Louise Glück, nature is the garden of the world after a fall from grace, consisting of fear, doubt and oppression. Thus, the annual cycle is repeatedly interrupted with evening and night prayers in which hopes and accusations are directed towards a divine being.
Man and woman meet in the world of the garden, they recognize each other in nature – it could also be said: they come to knowledge in the mirror of nature – and they are called to see beauty and duration, despite everything. negative. This secretive and rebellious optimism makes “Wilde Iris” one of the most polyphonic and composed volumes of American poetry of its decade, for which Glück was deservedly awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Melancholy and magic
The “changing land” – the title of the volume “Vita Nova” – is what gives Louise Glück a voice, it is as fragile as human nature in its struggle for freedom and self-knowledge. Luck’s constant recourse to ancient myths is intended to illustrate the permanence of the conditions in which we all live. His poems speak from person to person, so his language is clear and understandable, the formal experiments are alien to him, the freely rhythmic lines are musical enough.
Even if the poet takes the female perspective, she understands individual existence as an example for all people of all genders. Innumerable small and very small, often seemingly banal observations of everyday life create the specter of a world that can be perceived by the senses, for which the poet herself was “unprepared”. She sees her poems as preparations for readers: “You will be wounded and scarred, you will continue to starve. / Your body will age, you will continue to have needs. / You want the land and then more land », he sums up in the volume« The seven ages ».
Melancholy is the prevailing mood in his poems, which he always groups into book cycles, but there is a charm to it that is unparalleled in American poetry.
