Word: gluck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Louise Gluck seems to have mixed feelings about her own past as the author of poems like "Mock Orange," in which she wrote, "I hate them as I hate sex,/the man's mouth/sealing my mouth, the man's/ paralyzing body...
...Louise Gluck...
...course, this is a single poem, and Gluck has always been a complex poet. Yet her new book of poems, Vita Nova, presents a self-revision which suggests Gluck believes she has grown out of something. Vita Nova depicts reconciliation with personality sins: fear, dream, lying, fragmentation and women who do not regret their sexual falls but instead say to their lover, "Even before I was touched, I belonged to you;/you had only to look...
...Gluck, then, does not scorn her old idealism; she simply recognizes it as a self-fulfilling dream, embracing it as part of her identity and her human need for happiness. She is not embarrassed if in the past she was foolish or hypocritical: in "Earthly Love" Gluck admits that she once avoided clear self-perception and claims, "And yet, within this deception,/true happiness occurred." In "Descent to the valley," she describes her old vision of life as an upward climb into light followed by a descent into uncertainty, and then states, "I have found it otherwise...
Oddly enough, Gluck maintains a cool, stony voice throughout--despite her pluralistic embraces. She recalls antiquity, speaking through Aeneas, Eurydice and Orpheus in various poems, yet her usage encloses the most tragic scenes in a modern living room. She retells: "In the end, Dido/summoned her ladies in waiting/that they might see/the harsh destiny inscribed for her by the fates." The phrase "In the end" dooms the stanza to almost blase speech, which is almost bucked by the phrase "that they might," until the stanza ends with the prepositional pile-up "inscribed for her by the fates." Flat language and idioms...