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Holland-Batt, Sarah (2020) Louise Glück’s poetry alive in the presence of the abyss. The Weekend Australian, 7 November 2020. [Featured article]

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By Sarah Hollan‐Batt, 7‐11‐2020 Weekend Australian

We often discover the books that shape our lives in the most arbitrary ways. I encountered the work of the 2020 Nobel Laureate in Literature, the American poet Louise Gluck, by chance back when I was a teenager living in the US in the 1990s.

I was wandering around in Pearl Street Books in Boulder, Colorado: a red brick institution that dates back to when the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac once lived in the hood.

By chance, another customer had lazily left a copy of Gluck’s Pulitzer Prize‐winning collection, The Wild Iris, on a fraying chaise. I picked it up, read the first poem, and bought it.

Gluck, now 77, became a profoundly important poet to me: she spurred me to write poetry, and shifted my sense of what poetry is and can do. The debt I owe that stranger – who abandoned her book in just the right place, and at just the right time – still strikes me.

Gluck’s now‐classic volume is a book‐length sequence set in a garden which, at times, evokes the Biblical Garden of Eden, where god, flowers, and a human figure speak to one another and jostle for attention, in voices alternatingly querulous, plaintive, ardent and austere.

The opening poem I read that day – the titular poem, The Wild Iris – begins arrestingly: “At the end of my suffering / there was a door,” the poet writes, “Hear me out: that which you call death / I remember.” It isn’t immediately obvious from the opening who is speaking, or to whom, but as the poem progresses, we realise we are overhearing the wild iris itself, describing its journey from underground bulb into clear air.

“It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth”, the iris confides, describing its claustrophobia as “being / a soul and unable / to speak”. There are echoes of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land here, with its opening lines that link spring to suffering and rebirth: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land.” But for Gluck’s wild iris, blossoming offers liberation from mute burial. As the iris blooms, it comes into consciousness, and learns to speak:

You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: from the centre of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.

This image of rebirth and abundance takes on particular meaning with knowledge of Gluck’s history: a severe anorexic in her youth, she spent seven years in psychoanalytic treatment, then sustained a long period of writer’s block after the publication of her first book which made her consider abandoning writing altogether for a time. Fortunately, she persevered.

Gluck’s magnificent life’s work – totalling 12 collections of poetry so far, and several volumes of essays – returns again and again to the idea of speaking, address, the voice. Her poems continually use the second‐person address – also known as lyric apostrophe, a term which comes from the Greek, meaning to turn away – giving readers the impression that we are overhearing intimacies, as well as imperatives that rebuke or command the listener, like the iris’s bossy invocation, “Hear me out”.

But while Gluck’s poems give the impression of speech, they are rarely discursive. Instead, they are terse and oracular, and written in plain speech. Their lines are frequently end‐stopped, giving them an authoritative weight. Her speakers are analytical and self‐scrutinising, offering piercing observations which are stated baldly: “We look at the world once, in childhood / The rest is memory”, the poet tells us in the poem Nostos.

Gluck also trades in discomfiting paradoxes, as in the ending of First Memory, a poem about the death of the poet’s father: in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved.

It meant I loved.

While Gluck frequently draws upon what is seemingly personal subject matter, such as divorce, ageing, grief and amatory love, it would be a mistake to pigeonhole her poetry as confessional. Indeed, she often deflects such readings of her work by adopting personae and masks from myth and literature, superimposing the personal and the timeless in ways that make them difficult to separate.

In Averno – a book that takes its title from a volcanic crater lake in Campania which the ancient Romans believed was the entrance to the underworld – Gluck returns to the myth of Persephone. In Vita Nuova, she oscillates between the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Aeneas and Dido. In Meadowlands, she picks up the central marriage in Homer’s The Odyssey – Penelope weaving at home while Odysseus is at sea – which she places in counterpoint to her own disintegrating marriage.

While these collections reference classical narratives, Gluck uses compellingly contemporary language, leavening tragic subject matter with mordant humour. In the opening poem of Meadowlands, Penelope contemplates first Odysseus’s flaws, but also her own:

You have not been completely perfect either; with your troublesome body you have done things you shouldn’t discuss in poems.

Here, Gluck leaves open the question of where the myth ends and the personal begins; her genius lies in encouraging the reader to see the universal and the mythic in the contemporary, and vice versa.

In recent years, Gluck has written some of her very finest poems about ageing and mortality, whose stark truths she stares down with unsparing clarity. In the poem Averno, the poet appraises impending death with stoicism, describing a longing “To raise the veil. / To see what you’re saying goodbye to.” In The Night Migrations, she begins by observing the beauty of “the red berries of the mountain ash / and in the dark sky / the birds’ night migrations”, before taking a bleak turn, pre‐emptively mourning the ineffable losses death will usher in.

“It grieves me to think / the dead won’t see them”, she writes, “these things we depend on, / they disappear.” But rather than leaving the poem there, Gluck pushes the logic one step further, dwelling on what such nothingness really entails:

What will the soul do for solace then?

I tell myself maybe it won’t need these pleasures anymore; maybe just not being is simply enough, hard as that is to imagine.

In an essay, Gluck once contrasted the experience of reading TS Eliot with that of Rilke: “To read Eliot, for me, is to feel the presence of the abyss,” she wrote, whereas “to read Rilke is to sense the mattress under the window.” Her own poems are more abyss than mattress – yet her searching intelligence consoles.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is often derided for overlooking the evidently great in favour of the obscure. The great writers who never received the honour are legion: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy and WH Auden, for starters.

Equally, many who nabbed the gong go unread today. When Gluck’s win was announced, the annual re‐litigation kicked off about whether the usual suspects given shorter odds – Haruki Murakami, Don DeLillo – were robbed. Much of this commentary was made by those who likely have not read Gluck’s oeuvre.

The fact that Gluck is only the 16th woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature – out of 117 total laureates – seemed to get lost in the noise.

I’ve raised an eyebrow at more than one of the Swedish Academy’s recent choices. But this year, I raised a glass to Gluck’s genius; to her timeless poems, which deserve to be read for centuries; and to the stranger in a bookshop who once unknowingly handed the immense gift of her voice to me.